The Man with the Iron Heart (49 page)

“No, sir.” Bokov hadn’t seen front-line service.

“Only happened to me once, and I’m not sorry,” Shteinberg said. “It was early in the war. I had to deal with a major who lost his head.”
Lost his head
probably meant something like
retreated without orders.
And
deal with
certainly meant something like
kill.
“I was going to take him away, and this damned thing with a shark mouth painted on its nose screamed down on us, and…Well, I didn’t have to worry about the major any more. Not enough of him left to bury. It could have been me.”

It could always be you. In the Soviet Union, that was as axiomatic as anything out of Euclid. The knock on the door, the tap on the shoulder…It didn’t have to be nearly so dramatic as a screaming shark-mouthed dive bomber.

No wonder Shteinberg was so jumpy. No wonder everybody with a blue stripe around his cap was.

Another C-47 flew by, this one right overhead. “Don’t worry too much, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. “We’ll make it work.”

“Da,”
Shteinberg said, and then, “We’d better.”

Red Army sentries discouraged Germans from getting too close to the fortified zone. They shouted one warning—they’d learned to say
“Heraus!”
After that—usually only seconds after that—they opened fire.

They did just that this morning. Bokov heard the sharp, peremptory cry—German was a wonderful language for giving orders. He heard the sharp stutter of a three-round burst from the guard’s PPSh submachine gun when somebody didn’t listen to the order no matter how wonderfully peremptory it sounded. And he heard a screech that said at least one of those rounds connected.

Sure as hell, somebody was down and thrashing maybe seventy-five meters outside the perimeter. Bokov and Shteinberg loped over to him. He was a half-starved fellow with a beak of a nose and several days’ worth of gray stubble on his chin and cheeks. At the moment, he was clutching his left leg and cussing a blue streak.

Seeing two NKVD men bearing down on him only made him turn his indignation on them. “That
verkakte mamzer
went and shot me!” he exclaimed in what came fairly close to German.

“
Nu?
What did you expect him to do? Give you a big kiss?” Moisei Shteinberg replied in the same language. Bokov could follow it well enough to realize what was going on.
A Jew. A DP,
he thought.

The guard came up. He didn’t want to see two NKVD men, either. Anxiously, he said, “He didn’t move when I yelled. Orders are to open fire if they don’t move. I did what everybody above me told me to do.”

“It’s all right,” Bokov told him. “You’re not in trouble. Go back to your post.” With an enormous sigh of relief and a parade-ground salute, the guard obeyed.

“How bad are you hit?” Colonel Shteinberg asked the wounded man. The fellow pulled up his trouser leg. He had a bloody groove in the outside of his calf. Shteinberg waved dismissively. “That isn’t worth getting excited about.”

“Easy for you to say. It isn’t your leg, either,” the Jew—no, the other Jew—retorted. “Hurts like shit.” He didn’t say
Scheisse;
he said
govno.
Chances were he’d started out in Poland or the Soviet Union, then. Where he’d been since…

Bokov spoke German, not Yiddish: “Why didn’t you clear out when the guard warned you?”

“
Gevalt!
Some warning!” the DP said—Bokov had figured he’d be able to follow regular
Deutsch.
“The fucking Nazis couldn’t kill me off, so now you Russian
mamzrim
try and finish the job for them? A
kholeriyeh
on you!”

“Mamzrim?”
Bokov asked Shteinberg. It had to be the plural of the earlier insult, but Bokov didn’t know what the insult meant to begin with.

“Bastards,” Shteinberg supplied economically. He gave his attention back to the DP. “Everybody’s got a sob story these days. Some of them are even true. The rest aren’t good for wiping your ass.”

Muttering under his breath, the skinny man displayed a tattoo on his arm. “Know what that means, you—?” He bit back whatever he’d been about to add: no doubt a good idea.

But Colonel Shteinberg had to nod. Bokov also recognized a death-camp serial number. This fellow had seen hell on earth, all right. If he kept mouthing off, he might get to compare the Nazi and Soviet versions of it, too.

“And before they shipped me to Auschwitz, they had me digging their fucking mines for them in the mountains,” the Jew went on. “I go through all that, I live through all that, and your miserable shithead puts a hole in my leg. The way you talk, I should thank him.”

“Maybe you should,” Shteinberg said. “He could have hit you in the head.”

“Wait,” Vladimir Bokov said. Both Colonel Shteinberg and the DP looked at him in surprise. Bokov eyed the survivor. “You say you worked in the mines in the mountains. Down in the Alps?”

“That’s right,” the skinny man said. “What about it?”

“Were you just…digging out gypsum or whatever it was?” Bokov asked.

“No—tea with fucking lemon wedges,” the DP snapped. “What the devil else would I be doing down there?”

Bokov seldom faced such sarcasm, not from a man he was interrogating. The half-swallowed chuckle that came from Colonel Shteinberg didn’t help, either. Doing his best to ignore sarcasm and amusement, Bokov asked, “Did the Nazis care how much you brought up?”

“They cared how much I dug,” the wounded Jew answered. “If you didn’t do enough to suit ’em, you were a goner right there.”

“But did they care how much—fuck, call it gypsum—you brought up, or just how much you dug?” Bokov persisted, excitement tingling through him despite his best efforts to hold it down.

“Oh,” Shteinberg said softly. “I know what you’re driving at.”

“I sure don’t,” the DP said. Shteinberg had spoken Russian, not Yiddish or German. The DP still followed him.

That didn’t surprise Bokov, not after his earlier guesses. “Just answer my question,” he snapped, this time with an NKVD officer’s authority in his voice.

After frowning in memory—and, no doubt, in pain as well—the DP said, “As long as we moved rock, they didn’t give a shit. Some of us thought it was funny. Some of us just thought the Nazis were
meshigge.
”

“Nuts,” Shteinberg translated, adding, “That’s an ass-end-of-nowhere dialect of Yiddish he talks.”

“Who, me?” The skinny Jew sounded affronted. “I’m no dumb Litvak who goes
fiss
like a snake when he means
fish.
”

“Shibboleth,”
Moisei Shteinberg murmured, which seemed to mean something to the DP even if it didn’t to Bokov. Shteinberg took out a clasp knife and cut some cloth from the DP’s already-ragged trouser leg so he could bandage the bloody gouge. Then Shteinberg frisked him. He found a small chunk of a D-ration bar and—much better hidden—a U.S. five-dollar and a ten-dollar bill. “Where’d you get these?” he asked. “Tell it straight the first time, or you’ll be sorry.”

“Sorry? I’m already sorry,” the skinny man said. Before Shteinberg could say anything else, he went on, “Yeah, I know—I’ll be sorrier. You people know how to take care of that. The guys who gave me the money were a couple of American soldiers. Officers, even, I think. They gave me the chocolate, too. It’s not so great, but it fills you up. I’ve been empty a lot.”

“Americans, eh?” Bokov sounded less suspicious than he would have most of the time. His own thoughts were racing in a different direction. Eyeing the DP, he asked, “Were they Jews, too?”

“Yeah. They talked Yiddish to me, not German. Better than him, too—one of them sounded just like me.” The man sneered at Shteinberg. Captain Bokov wouldn’t have wanted to piss off an NKVD colonel, but the DP didn’t seem to give a damn. “They treated me a hell of a lot better all the way around, if you want to know what I think.”

“Fat chance,” Shteinberg said.

Bokov thought exactly the same thing at the same time. All the same, he asked, “This place where the Nazis had you digging—could you find it again? Could you show us where it is?” He leaned forward, waiting for the answer.

The DP said only, “It ain’t in your zone.”

“I understand that.” Bokov could be patient when he needed to. “But could you?”

“Maybe.” The skinny Jew wasn’t about to admit anything, not till he knew which way the wind blew.

Shteinberg made a fist and brought it down—on the cement next to the fellow’s wounded leg. “Then…maybe…we won’t have to get rough to find out.”

“Are you still thinking along with me, sir?” Bokov asked.

The colonel smiled a vulpine smile. “Maybe,” he said.

T
HE
F
OURTH OF
J
ULY HAD ALWAYS BEEN
D
IANA
M
C
G
RAW’S FAVORITE
holiday—well, except for Christmas, which was a different kind of thing altogether. The Fourth went with picnics and beer and sometimes going to the park to listen to bands and patriotic songs and speeches and waiting through the long hot sticky day for nightfall at last and cuddling with Ed while fireworks set the sky ablaze above them and the kids went
“Ooooo!”

And here was the Fourth come round again. Here she was in a park again, only in Indianapolis, not Anderson. The McGraws had gone to the state capital a couple of times before the war, to see if the fireworks were better. Once they were. They weren’t the next time, so the family didn’t go back.

Diana looked out at the throng of people in the park with her, at the throng of American flags, at the throng of placards. They stretched from just in front of the speakers’ platform to too far away to read, but the ones she couldn’t make out were bound to say the same things as the ones she could. If you were here today, you wanted Harry Truman to bring the boys home from Germany.

If you were here today…She turned to the Indianapolis police officer who stood on the platform with her and the other people who would talk in a while. “How big a crowd to you think we’ve got today, Lieutenant Offenbacher?”

Offenbacher’s beer belly and double chin said he spent most of his time at a desk. He didn’t look happy standing here sweating in the sun. Still, he shaded his eyes with a hand and peered out over the still-swelling mass of people. “From what I can see, and from what I’ve heard from the men on crowd-control duty, I’d say, mm, maybe fifteen or twenty thousand folks.”

Experience had taught Diana that cops cut the size of crowds by at least half—more often two-thirds—when they didn’t like the cause. By now, she’d had a good deal of practice gauging them, too. This one looked more like forty or fifty thousand to her. But even Offenbacher’s estimate was impressive enough.

“Just think,” she said brightly. “We’ve got rallies like this in every big city from coast to coast—and in a lot of cities that aren’t so big, too.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Lieutenant Offenbacher’s voice held no expression whatever.

They had governors and Congressmen and Senators speaking at the rallies, too. It had been less than two years since Diana started her movement. Back then, most politicians wanted nothing to do with it or with her. Jerry Duncan, bless him, was the exception, not the rule. But things had changed. Oh, yes, just a little!

And they also had actors and actresses speaking. It wasn’t bad publicity, not any more. They had singers. They had ministers and priests—next to no rabbis. They had baseball players. (Not all of them, of course. What Ted Williams told them to do with their invitation wasn’t repeatable in polite company. It wasn’t physically possible, either.) They had writers—newspapermen and novelists.

They had some of just about every kind of people who could make other people listen. No, Diana hadn’t known what she was getting into when she started out. She also hadn’t known how many others she could bring along with her.

And they still had people who hated their guts. The cops Offenbacher led weren’t just keeping the anti-occupation crowd orderly. They were also keeping counter-demonstrators from wading into the crowd with their own picket signs—and with baseball bats and tire irons and any other toys they could get their hands on. Some of the chants that rose from their opponents might have made Ted Williams blush.

“Can’t your men arrest them for public obscenity?” Diana asked Offenbacher.

“Well, they could,” the boss cop allowed. “Maybe if things get worse.”

“Worse? How?”

“You never know,” Lieutenant Offenbacher said. Diana understood that much too well. The Indianapolis police sympathized with the counter-demonstrators. They wouldn’t do anything against them they didn’t absolutely have to.

Time to get the show on the road. Diana stepped up to the microphone. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, and paused while cheers and applause drowned out the noise from the opposition’s peanut gallery. “Thank you for coming out this afternoon. We’ve got some terrific people lined up to talk to you, and we’ve got one of the best fireworks shows in town waiting for you after the sun goes down.” More cheers, maybe even louder this time. As they ebbed, Diana went on, “But most of all, thank you for being here, no matter why you came. We still need to show Harry Truman and all the people in Washington with their heads in the sand that there are lots and lots of us, and we aren’t about to go away!”

A great roar swelled up from the crowd:
“That’s right!”

“It sure is,” Diana said. “And now it’s my pleasure to introduce our first speaker, City Councilman Gus van Slyke!”

Van Slyke had a belly even bigger than Lieutenant Offenbacher’s. He’d made a fortune selling used cars. He hadn’t come down one way or the other on the German occupation till a friend’s nephew got wounded over there. That convinced him. (That he couldn’t stand Truman probably didn’t hurt.)

“We won the war. By gosh, we did,” he said. His voice was gruff and growly, like a bear’s just waking from hibernation. “Now enough is enough. What are we doing over there in Europe? We’re getting good young men, our best, killed and maimed. We aren’t accomplishing anything doing it. The fanatics are still there, no matter what we’ve tried. And how much money have we flushed away? Billions and bill—”