The Man with the Iron Heart (46 page)

Business as usual, then, at the same old stand. Well, almost as usual. The German Freedom Front had to do without a whole mine’s worth of munitions and small arms. Two valleys over, the miserable Americans had collapsed the whole thing when they touched off their damned charges up near the surface. That should never have happened—whoever’d designed that storage system had screwed up in a big way. Which didn’t mean Heydrich could do anything about it now.

The struggle went on regardless. Most ways, it went pretty well. The fellow who’d come up with the bright idea of using exploding trucks and cars in sequence to do more damage would win himself a Knight’s Cross. That scheme was a beauty—it could hardly work any better. Heydrich had no authentic Knight’s Crosses to hand out, but he could improvise. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done it before. An Iron Cross Second Class with the proper ribbon—which he did have—would do the job just fine. Everyone would know it stood for a real
Ritterkreuz.
Besides, a medal truly wasn’t iron and ribbon—it was a reminder of what the holder had done to earn it.

Heydrich touched the Knight’s Cross that hung at his own throat. Even if he weren’t wearing it, he would know he had it, and why. That was the only thing that mattered. He went through the latest pile of newspapers and magazines from the outside world that Hans had left on his desk. The French were still vowing to rebuild the Eiffel Tower: de Gaulle had made another speech before their Chamber of Deputies.

Another story in the
International Herald-Tribune
told how the English, apparently without any political speeches, were already rebuilding Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s. Reinhard Heydrich nodded to himself. If he hadn’t come upon a fundamental difference between the two races there, he didn’t know when he ever would. The English monuments had been bombed later. He had no doubt they would rise again first.

But then, on an inside page, he found a story that interested him even more. The American Congress (a vaguely obscene name for a parliament, he’d always thought) was still wrangling about whether to pay for keeping U.S. soldiers in Germany. Signs were that Congress didn’t want to, but the President still did.

Heydrich knew what he would do in Harry Truman’s place. The leaders of Congress who didn’t want to go along with him would get a visit from…what did the Amis call their
Gestapo
? From the FBI, that was it. Then they would see things Truman’s way. If they didn’t, their funerals would no doubt be well attended.

If Truman had plans along those lines, the
Herald-Tribune
didn’t talk about them. It wouldn’t, of course. But Heydrich didn’t believe Truman would do the obvious, necessary thing. Americans were fools. They were rich fools, fools with enormous factories, but fools all the same. The factories let them smash the
Wehrmacht.
Still, they had no stomach for what came after even a victorious war….

Or did they? A German magazine had a glowing article about the police force the Amis were organizing in their zone. Heydrich already knew about that, naturally. But getting the American slant—for what else was the magazine but an American propaganda rag?—was interesting. Very interesting, in fact.

Before the collapse, the writer had worked for the
Völkischer Beobachter;
Heydrich recognized his name. Well, he’d landed on his feet. He claimed that this new police corps would protect order and guard against extremism, whether from the left or the right. He also claimed the Amis were building it up to be strong enough and reliable enough to do its duty under any conceivable political circumstances.

“Any?” Heydrich murmured. That was a large claim, to say the least. And Heydrich also knew enough to translate it from journalese into plain German. The writer obviously hoped most of his readers didn’t. If the Americans decided to hop on their planes and boats and go back across the Atlantic where they belonged, the new police corps would stay behind as their surrogates.

During the war, Germany had set up plenty of police outfits like that. The French
Milice
fought the French resistance harder than any German outfits in France ever did. Latvian and Lithuanian policemen cheerfully delivered Jews to the Germans for disposal. General Nedic’s militia in Serbia harried the Titoists.

All of those police forces fell apart when the German military might supporting them waned. Did the Amis think the same thing wouldn’t happen to their sheep dogs after they went home? If they did, they really were fools.

And did they think their fancy new police corps wasn’t riddled with traitors? Heydrich shook his head.
With true German patriots,
he thought. It depended on how you looked at things, though. Some of Nedic’s men had warned Tito’s followers what their outfit was up to. Some members of the
Milice
played a double game with the resistance.

Some members of the Americans’ German police were in touch with the forces that aimed to restore the
Reich
to greatness, too. Heydrich usually knew what the would-be oppressors had in mind before they tried it. None of their moves had hurt him yet. He had to be careful—the Americans weren’t too naïve to plant false information—but so far he’d outsmarted them.

How many men from the
Milice
had de Gaulle’s French forces shot or imprisoned? What had the Titoists done to Nedic’s militia? How had the Russians treated Germany’s Latvian and Lithuanian collaborators? Heydrich slowly smiled. None of that would be a patch on the revenge he aimed to take on the German police who cozied up to the Americans.

“Revenge on the USA, too,” he said, as if reminding himself. Von Braun and the other slide-rule soldiers at Peenemünde had made rockets that could hit London from the Continent. They’d planned much bigger beasts: rockets that could hit America from Europe. Only the collapse kept the scientists from building them.

A lot of those scientists were twiddling their slide rules for the United States these days. Others were working for the Russians. But some remained in Germany. And the
Reich
still had plenty of scientists and engineers who could learn rocketry if they needed to.

Which they would. A rocket that could reach New York City with an atom bomb in its nose would teach the Americans they couldn’t tell Germany what to do any more. And rockets like that could also reach far into Russia—farther than the
Wehrmacht
ever got. As soon as Germany built them, Stalin would have to think twice before he started any new trouble.

Heydrich could hardly wait.

Lou Weissberg’s mother had talked about how good it felt
not
to have to wear a corset when they fell out of fashion after World War I. Lou always nodded. What were you supposed to do when your mother went on about something that wouldn’t matter to you in a million years?

Except now it did. He’d escaped his own canvas-and-metal contraption not long before. His leg didn’t bother him too much, either. He was…no, not quite good as new, but getting there, anyway. On this second anniversary of V-E Day, that wasn’t so bad.

It was a bright spring morning. Sunshine. Puffy white clouds drifting across the sky. Vibrant greens. Songbirds chirping their heads off. Storks nesting on chimneytops wherever chimneys still stood. And the stink of undiscovered bodies buried in rubble, the stink that never seemed to disappear from Nuremberg but did fade in the chilly wintertime.

Howard Frank snorted when Lou remarked on it. “Yeah, well, those are the krauts we don’t have to worry about,” Frank said.

“Ha!” Lou said around a mouthful of scrambled eggs and hash browns. “Don’t I wish that was funny!”

“I know, I know.” Major Frank lit a cigarette. “At ten o’clock we get to listen to General Clay telling us how wonderful everything’s going.”

“Oh, boy.” Lou had no trouble restraining his enthusiasm. General Eisenhower’d gone back to the States at the end of the year before. Staying any longer would have tarnished his reputation as the man who’d won the war in Europe…assuming the war in Europe had been won. Germany was Lucius Clay’s baby now, and a damned ugly baby to find on your doorstep it was, too.

“Next interesting question is whether the fanatics mortar us while we’re listening to Clay tell us how wonderful everything is,” Frank said.

“You’re chipper today, aren’t you?” Lou said. In lieu of answering, his superior smoked his Chesterfield down to a tiny butt, stubbed it out, and lit another one.

German cops on street corners stiffened to attention as the two American officers went to listen to General Clay. The policemen wore their black-dyed American uniforms. Some of them had on American helmets, too. Others wore what had been firemen’s helmets, with an aluminum crest to change the outline of what otherwise looked the same as the standard German
Stahlhelm.
And, with shortages everywhere, some of the cops
did
wear the
Wehrmacht
-issue steel helmet.

Pointing to one of those guys—who also carried a U.S.-made submachine gun—Lou said, “That still gives me the willies, y’know?”

Howard Frank didn’t need to ask what in particular was eating him. The major only nodded. “Yeah, me, too,” he agreed. “But what are you gonna do? They may see action, and it’s a damn good helmet. When we switched from the limey-style tin hat to the one we use now, first scheme was to make
Stahlhelms
and just paint ’em a different color.”

“Fuck. I’m glad we didn’t. That thing screams
Nazi!
at me.” Since the Kaiser’s engineers had devised the shape in the last war, Lou knew that wasn’t completely rational. He didn’t care. Hitler’s bastards had been trying to kill him, not the Kaiser’s—except for some retreads, no doubt. He gave the next German cop he saw a fishy stare. “Other thing is, how many of these bastards are ratting on us to Heydrich?”

“Bound to be some. Hopefully, not too many.” Howard Frank sounded somewhere between cynical and resigned.

A couple of other guys in dyed-black U.S. uniform came by. They weren’t German police; they had on armbands that said DP. They sure as hell were displaced persons. They talked to each other in some Slavic language—Russian? Polish? Ukrainian? Czech? Serbo-Croatian? Bulgarian?—full of consonants and
y
’s. One of them carried a grease gun like the cop’s; the other wore a Luger on his belt.

At least they don’t have German helmets,
Lou thought. With more and more American soldiers heading home, DPs were doing a hell of a lot of the cooking and cleaning and fetching and carrying. The way things were going, the occupation would probably fall apart without them. On the Eastern Front, the Germans had used Russian POWs—
Hiwis,
they called them, a contraction from their term for “volunteer assistants”—the same way, and for the same reason: to stretch their combat manpower. Now they were getting it done to them instead.
Serves ’em right, too.

Better not to inquire about what happened to any
Hiwis
who fell into Soviet hands. Lou might want to work more closely with the Russians against the Heydrichites. That didn’t mean he thought they were nice people. But they weren’t on the Nazis’ side, which also counted.

A perimeter of barbed wire, concrete barriers, and machine-gun nests protected the Americans gathering to hear General Clay from German kamikazes driving trucks full of TNT. Mortars…Lou shook his head. He’d already worried about mortars once. If they started coming in, he’d hit the dirt, that was all.

Even as Clay stepped up to the microphone, several enlisted men bawled, “We want to go home!”

Clay looked at them. He had bushy dark eyebrows that told what he was thinking without his saying a word. If he wasn’t thinking
stockade
right this minute, Lou’d never seen anybody who was.

He had a raspy voice that spoke of a million cigarettes, or maybe a million and one. “I want to go home, too,” he said. “We all want to go home. I don’t know of a single soldier in Uncle Sam’s army who wants to stay in Germany. But we’ve got what they used to call a job of work to do, and we’re going to do it.”

When he paused, some of the soldiers yelled, “We want to go home!” again. They didn’t give a damn about a general or anybody else. They were draftees. They sure didn’t give a damn about winning the war before they left, the way earlier crops of dogfaces had. After all, the war in Europe had been over for two years—hadn’t it? If it hadn’t, why were they all standing around on this nice May morning? Why weren’t they out trying to pick up German broads with chocolate bars?

But if the war in Europe had been over for two years, why all the tank barriers and machine-gun positions and barbed wire?
Yeah. Why?
Lou wondered, his own thoughts pretty barbed, too.

General Clay charged into that question head-on: “We beat the German army. We walloped the
Waffen
-SS, too. You know it, boys. Some of you helped do it. And some of you saw what the Nazis did while they were on top. You know why we had to lick them. If we hadn’t, one of these days before too long they would have done that stuff to our friends and neighbors and families.”

“Damn straight,” Howard Frank muttered beside Lou. Lou nodded. As far as he was concerned, Lucius Clay was preaching to the choir. He’d never yet heard of a Jewish soldier who went around shouting
We want to go home!
Jews understood in their
kishkas
what this war was all about.

But there weren’t enough Jews to go around, goddammit.

“And they still want to,” Clay went on. “That’s the funny thing about this whole business. Plenty of people back home march around and wave signs and bang drums and yell and scream and shout that we ought to pack up and get the devil out of Germany. But not one of them says the Germans are good guys all of a sudden. Not one of them says the Nazis won’t take over again if we do run away.”

Lou craned his neck. He didn’t see any of the German policemen in their black GI uniforms inside the American perimeter. How hard would they fight the fanatics after the Americans went home? Some of them had spent time in concentration camps under the Third
Reich.
Those guys would give Heydrich’s goons a smack in the teeth if they could. The rest? Well, who could say?

And, even if the new kraut cops were willing to mix it up with the Nazis, would they stay that way after a sniper picked off their wife or mother or two-year-old? That was already starting to happen. Or suppose a truck full of explosives blew up a police barracks in the middle of the night. That had already happened more than once, too. What would it do to the cops’ morale?

Lost in those gloomy reflections, Lou realized he’d missed some of what General Clay was saying. “—thinks we need to be here,” Clay declared. Then he said, “The President is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States,” so Lou figured out what was going on. “As long as the commander-in-chief thinks we need to stay in this country, we will. The sooner our friends and our foes understand that, the better.”

It sounded good. It would have sounded even better if one of the fed-up GIs hadn’t hollered, “Not if Congress doesn’t give him the cash!”

As if on cue, several other men called, “We want to go home!” again.

“Congress will do whatever Congress does. The President will do whatever he feels he has to do. And we will do whatever the President and our superiors tell us to do.” Clay stuck out his chin. “And so will I, and so will every one of you, too.”

He stepped away from the microphone. Some of the soldiers assembled to listen to him applauded. Lou and Major Frank both made sure they did—but then, they had their reasons. Lou assumed MPs had kept an eye on the hecklers and would give them what-for afterwards. He hoped so, anyway.

Even if they did, though, so what? The mouthy draftees might spend some time in the stockade for disrespect, or whatever other charges had a chance of sticking. While they were there, they’d still have plenty to eat and somewhere soft and dry to sleep. Heydrich’s thugs wouldn’t be trying to bump them off, either. If all you wanted to do was come home in one piece, the stockade didn’t look half bad.

When Lou said as much, Major Frank answered, “Sure, if that’s all you want. But it goes on your record, too. It won’t look so good when you’re trying to land a job once you get home.”

“How many of these guys give a damn?” Lou said. “How many of ’em think that far ahead?”

Howard Frank looked as if he’d put down several too many a while ago and his head was banging like Buddy Rich’s drums.
“Mazeltov,”
he said sourly.

“For what?” Lou asked.

“For nailing the USA down tight in two goddamn questions, that’s for what,” Frank answered.

Neither one of them had much else to say on the way back to their offices.

A
S FAR AS
B
ERNIE
C
OBB WAS CONCERNED, THE KRAUTS KNEW WAY
more about tanks and machine guns and beer than anybody in the United States had ever imagined. The Panzer IVs and Panthers and Tigers (
Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!
) were out of business, thank God. You still had to look out for fanatics with MG42s, but not right this minute, also thank God. As for the beer…

Bernie had a big old stein of it in front of him. He’d already emptied the mug several times. He expected to empty it several more before the day or the night or whatever the hell was through. A bunch of GIs packed the tavern in the Alpine village with the unpronounceable name. As he’d discovered, there were a lot of Alpine villages with unpronounceable names. This one was more unpronounceable than most, which was—or would have been—saying something.

“Thank you kindly.” Toby Benton had taken on a considerable alcoholic cargo, too. The sergeant sounded mushmouthed any old time—that was what coming from Oklahoma did to you. When he was also drunk, you could hardly understand him at all.

“Goin’ home.” Bernie didn’t sound like anybody from the speech and debate team, either. “Man alive…You
are
a man alive.”

“Sure am.” The demolitions expert nodded. “Sure as hell am. Didn’t know if I was gonna make it through, ’specially with the way they went an’ kept stretchin’ our hitches an’ stretchin’ ’em an’….”

Every guy in the joint growled profane agreement with that, even the fellows who hadn’t been over here since before the shooting was supposed to be over. “Way my points added up, I figured I’d make it back in November or December of ’45,” Bernie said. “I’m still here a year and a half later. God only knows when they’ll turn me loose.”

“Long as you don’t go home in a box, that’s the only thing that matters,” another GI said. He raised his voice a little: “Anybody here
not
know somebody who got it after fucking V-E Day?”

No one claimed to, not even a couple of kids who’d been here only a few weeks. “It’s a bastard, all right,” Sergeant Benton said. “Ain’t we lucky we won the war?”

“Some luck.” Bernie Cobb peered lugubriously into the bottom of his seidel. “I don’t even have any beer left.”

“You can do something about that, you know,” the dogface sitting next to him said.

“Oh, yeah.” Bernie needed reminding. He waved to the barmaid. “Hey, sweetheart!”

He wouldn’t have called her
sweetheart
anywhere else, and not without a few under her belt, either. She was somewhere in her mid-thirties. She wasn’t ugly—she wasn’t half bad, in fact, and she had a shape like a Coke bottle. Even drunk, though, he wasn’t tempted to put a move on her. She looked tough, was what she looked. He wondered if she’d been through a denazifying trial. If somebody told him she’d been one of the nasty female guards at a German camp, he would have believed it.