The Man with the Iron Heart (37 page)

“They don’t like it for beans, that’s for sure,” Robertson agreed. “Their war-crimes people—all officers, you know—cuss as much as they can in English or German. Then they go back to Russian and really cut loose.”

“We ought to do more with their Intelligence people. By God, we really should,” Lou said. “We’ve got the same enemy, just like we did before V-E Day.”

A considerable silence followed. Lou considered it—unhappily—while Major Frank and Major Robertson looked at each other. How far into his mouth had he stuck his foot? At last, voice gentle, Frank said, “That won’t go very far if you try to push it up the line. I told you so before.”

The bourbon at an unaccustomed hour might have hit Lou harder than he figured, for he said, “Why, dammit? About time somebody did.”

Ezra Robertson looked down into his now-empty glass. “You know what ‘PAF’ stands for, Captain?” he asked quietly.

Lou nodded. You picked up all kinds of weird stuff in the CIC. Most of it you put right back down again, because you couldn’t use it. But bits and pieces stuck whether you could use them or not. “Premature Anti-Fascist,” Lou said. “Guys who went to Spain to fight for the Republic and like that.”

“Yeah. And like that,” Robertson agreed. “Guys who could’ve given us a lot of special help during the regular fighting, too. Only most of ’em never got the chance, on account of we didn’t trust ’em as far as we could throw ’em. You go yelling we should team up with the NKVD, you’ll end up in that same basket, y’know.”

“I’m no Red,” Lou said. Some of the Americans who’d come over to administer prostrate Germany had had those leanings. A few of them were now working directly for Uncle Joe, because they’d headed for the Soviet zone one jump ahead of the internal investigators.

“We know you aren’t,” Major Frank said. “But if you start talking about working with the Russians, you’ll bump up against people who’ve never heard of you before.”

“And they’ll nail you to the cross,” Ezra Robertson added.

“Oy,”
Lou said dryly. Howard Frank snorted. Major Robertson didn’t get it. Lou hadn’t expected him to—
goys
would be
goys.
Lou only wished he thought the New Englander was wrong. With a sigh, he went on, “Might almost be worth throwing away my Army career for. I think it needs doing.”

“Wouldn’t just be your Army career,” Robertson said. “You’d fubar your whole life. Every place you looked for a job, people would go, ‘He’s the one who…’ You don’t believe me, find one of those guys who fought in the Lincoln Brigade and see how much fun he’s had wearing ‘PAF’ ever since.”

He might have been talking about the weather. He couldn’t have been much more matter-of-fact if he were. And he seemed more likely to know what he was talking about than most weathermen of Lou’s acquaintance. (Lou remembered the Frenchman who’d gone into the Seine. Talk about luck!)

“Shit,” Lou said. He got back up and headed for the bar again. One double wasn’t enough to get him where he wanted to go. As the PFC built him a refill, he decided two might not get him there, either.

O
BERSCHARFÜHRER
K
LEIN CAME INTO
R
EINHARD
H
EYDRICH’S OFFICE
with a stack of newspapers that had found their way…here…from the French zone and from France itself. They all went on and on about the downfall of the Eiffel Tower, and about what France was doing to pay the Germans back.

After quickly flipping through them, Heydrich asked, “Have you seen these, Hans?”

“I’ve looked at a few of ’em, anyhow,” the veteran noncom answered. “Sounds like the Frenchies are pissing themselves—and pissing on us.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Heydrich said, not without satisfaction. “And it sounds like there’s a regular partisan war going on in the French zone. Plenty of people will pick up a rifle when they think what happens to them if they don’t will be worse.”

“
Ja,
I saw that, too,” Klein said. “More than one of the stories blame it all on us. ‘Heydrichite fanatics,’ they say.” He sounded proud of the label.

“Scheisse,”
said Heydrich himself. “Our people aren’t doing anything in the French zone right now. Nothing, you hear me? I ordered our cells there to stay quiet, because I knew the French would go out of their minds for a while if Voss managed to bring the Tower down.”

“They’re bad enough anyway—much worse than the Englanders or the Americans. Sometimes they’re worse than the damned Russians, too,” Klein said.

“Well, the damned Russians really did beat the
Wehrmacht
in the end. That makes them feel better,” Heydrich said. “The French never did—the Anglo-Americans had to rescue them. So they’re still afraid their cocks are too small, and they act tough to try and make up for it.”

Hans Klein guffawed. “That’s telling ’em, sir!”

“The only thing they’ll do in the occupation zone is get us more recruits,” Heydrich said. “Anybody who’s willing to grab a gun and fight them on his own is liable to be someone we can use.”

“If our people are lying low, how do we find ’em? How do they find us?” Klein asked.

Heydrich only shrugged. “We’ll manage. We’ll do it later if we don’t do it right away. We’re in this for the long haul, Hans. If we’re still down here in 1955 or 1960, then we are, that’s all.”

Klein looked down at his hand. “If we are, I’ll be pale as a ghost.”

“Remember to take your Vitamin D tablet,” Heydrich said. “But I don’t think we’ll still be down here then. We have the will for the struggle, however long it takes. Do our enemies? I don’t think so.”

S
OUND TRUCKS BLARED
J
ERRY
D
UNCAN’S MESSAGE TO THE PEOPLE IN
his district: “Reelect Duncan! Bring our boys home from Germany! Keep us prosperous!”

Jerry knew
Reelect
was the magic word. Once you got in, you had to do something pretty stupid to make the voters want to throw you out. Or things had to go into the toilet, the way they had in the Depression. Herbert Hoover dragged his whole party down the drain with him.

But they had a chance to come back here in ’46.
At last!
Jerry thought. Germany was Harry Truman’s mess, nobody else’s. More and more Democrats winced every time they stood up to support the President. Douglas Catledge’s posters said
DON’T THROW VICTORY AWAY!
How much of a victory was it, though, when the Eiffel Tower lay in ruins?

“President Truman doesn’t want to listen to the American people!” Duncan shouted at a speech in a park in Anderson. His wife stood on the platform with him, along with the mayor of Anderson and a couple of councilmen. The weather was gray and cool: summer giving way to fall. The forecast had said it might rain, but that seemed to be holding off. Jerry was glad—he had a good crowd on this Saturday afternoon. “Truman doesn’t want to listen!” he repeated, louder this time. “He doesn’t want to bring our soldiers home from Germany! Well, if he doesn’t want to, we just have to make him, that’s all!”

People clapped their hands. They cheered. Oh, a few hecklers lurked in the crowd. They jeered and hooted. Some of them tried to start a
“Sieg heil!”
chant. That was Truman’s best argument—tarring people who’d had enough with the Nazi brush. But Jerry’s backers didn’t let the
“Sieg heil!”
chorus get started. They hustled the chanters away. A few scuffles broke out, but cops kept things from getting out of hand.

“When you don’t have a plan of your own, you smear the man who does,” Jerry ad-libbed, and got another hand. He went on, “We don’t have any business in Germany any more. We’re just getting sucked deeper and deeper into this swamp.” He held up a newspaper. “Yesterday, six more GIs got killed in what people call the American zone. Another thirteen got wounded. Lucky thirteen, right?”

The laugh that rippled up was bitter, scornful—not at him, but at the President. “No more Truman! We need a new man!” somebody yelled. That won a hand, too—a bigger one than Jerry had got.

“We do need a new man,” Jerry agreed. “But we have to wait two more years for that. In the meantime, we have to bring the man we’ve got to his senses. No more blank checks for our stupidity across the Atlantic. No more money to keep our soldiers in Germany unless we start bringing them home right away!”

That did it. The crowd erupted. More hecklers tried to break up the tumultuous applause. They got shouted down. “Take a look at what’s happening in the French zone,” Jerry said. “The French tried to get revenge for the Eiffel Tower, and what did they end up with? Their very own shooting war, even worse than the one we’re stuck with in our zone. And do you know what’ll happen next? I’ll tell you what. They’ll come begging us to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. We had to do it in 1918. We had to do it two years ago, too. They sure can’t take care of themselves. They’ve proved that over and over again.”

More cheers. You couldn’t go wrong taking shots at France. Jerry had thought about trotting out the French war debt from World War I, but held off. Clobbering Truman was more likely to get his followers all hot and bothered.

And he had plenty to clobber Truman about. Foreign policy was one thing. If you had a son or a brother or a husband stuck in Germany, it mattered to you. But if you didn’t, what happened overseas didn’t seem to count so much.

On the other hand, everybody had to eat. “How many of you’ve tried to buy hamburger any time lately?” Jerry asked. A forest of hands went up. “How many of you managed to do it?” he asked. Quite a few of the hands went down. “How many of you paid less than a dollar a pound?” he inquired. Not a single hand stayed up. Jerry waved to show he got it. “Didn’t think so. I know my wife paid a dollar and seven cents—didn’t you, sweetheart?” Betsy Duncan nodded. Jerry finished, “And I’ll tell you something else I know, too. I know that’s a shame and a disgrace and a crime!”

Had he got hands like that every time he went up onto the stump, he could have been elected President himself. President? Hell, he could have been elected Pope—and he wasn’t even Catholic.

V
LADIMIR
B
OKOV FELT HIMSELF CAST BACK IN TIME TO THE BAD DAYS,
the dark days of 1941 and 1942. The Hitlerites had had the bit between their teeth then. They did whatever they chose to do, and the Soviet Union had to react to it.

Well, the Soviet Union
did
react, and react well. Otherwise, Captain Bokov wouldn’t have been prowling through the ruined streets of Berlin. Instead, some
Sicherheitsdienst
officer would have stalked through wrecked Moscow, trying to keep stubborn Soviet partisans from damaging the city any more.

“Bozhemoi!”
Bokov muttered, shaking his head. This work had to be getting to him if pictures like that formed in his head.

It was. He knew it was. And he knew why. Despite the biggest military victory in the history of the world, the USSR was reacting to the Nazis again. The Heydrichites blasted radium all over the heart of Frankfurt. Soviet technicians had to check everything and everyone bound for the motherland from Germany to make sure no radium went along. Inconvenient? So what! Expensive? So what! Time-consuming? Again, so what! So said Moscow, against whose orders there was no appeal.

Now the Fascist bandits had managed to knock over the Eiffel Tower. Which meant…To Moscow, it meant all prominent cultural monuments in Eastern Europe needed special guards to keep the same thing from happening to them. Inconvenient? Expensive? Time-consuming? So what! Stalin had decided that the USSR wouldn’t be humiliated the way France had been.

Bokov had heard that Stalin couldn’t stand de Gaulle. Visiting Moscow, de Gaulle had called the battle of Stalingrad “a symbol of our common victories over the enemy.” Stalin hadn’t asked,
What French victories?
—though Bokov thought he himself might have, were he in the Marshal’s position. But Stalin never took de Gaulle seriously again after that, either.

More guards protected the monument commemorating the Red Army’s liberation of Berlin than any others. That was the one that had to gall the Heydrichites the most. The troops around it understood. “Oh, yes, Comrade Captain,” said a Red Army major commanding a battalion. “We know they may try and hit us. Well, they can try, but they won’t get through unless they’ve gone and stashed some tanks nearby.”