The Man with the Iron Heart (5 page)

“You better believe it.” Lou’s nod was jerky. “Twenty-three dead, they’re saying now. And almost twice that many wounded bad enough to need treatment.”

“Shit.” Benton’s drawl almost turned it into a two-syllable word. “Good thing the Jerries didn’t get so many of our guys for every one of theirs while the fighting was still going on. We had more people than they did—more stuff too—but not that much more.”

“Mm.” Lou hadn’t thought of it in those terms, which didn’t mean the ordnance sergeant was wrong. “If you were out to turn somebody into a walking bomb, how would you go about it?”

“Same way these fuckers did, I reckon,” Benton replied. “The Nazis bite the big one, but nobody ever said they couldn’t handle shit like this. Explosives—around the guy’s middle, I guess, so they wouldn’t show so much. Scrap metal, nails, whatever the hell for shrapnel. A battery. A button to push. And
kapow!
”

“Yeah.
Kapow!
” Lou’s echo sounded hollow, even to himself.

“What do we do about shit like this, Lieutenant?” Benton asked. “If this asshole wasn’t just your garden-variety nut, seems to me like we got ourselves some trouble. The way we fight is, we want to live, and we want to make sure the other sons of bitches don’t. Always figured the krauts played by the same rules. But if all of a sudden-like they don’t give a shit no more, sure as hell makes ’em harder to defend against.”

“I know.” Lou clenched his fist and pounded it against the side of his thigh. He didn’t notice he was doing it till it started to hurt. Then he quit. “God damn it to hell, Toby, the war in Europe is over. They surrendered. We can do whatever we want to their people, and they’ve got to know it.”

“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Benton agreed. “That’s how come I hope he was a nut. If they’ve got waddayacallems—partisans…Russians and Yugoslavs gave old Adolf a fuck of a lot of grief with guys like that. I guess even the froggies caused him some trouble.” After hitting the beach on D-Day, his opinion of France and things French could have been higher.

“Well, it’s not my call, thank God,” Lou said. “I haven’t got the stomach for lining rows of people up against a wall and shooting ’em. Even Germans—except camp guards and mothers like that.” His voice went ferocious. He’d done Latin in college before the war, and remembered coming across the Roman Emperor who wished all mankind had one neck, so he could get rid of it at a single stroke. Back then, he’d thought that was one of the most savage things he’d ever heard. He felt the same way about SS men himself these days.

“Shit, sir, it wouldn’t be so bad if it was only them. But all these chickenshit civilians and
Wehrmacht
guys who swear on a stack of Bibles they didn’t know squat about any concentration camps…No, sirree, not them. My ass!” Benton made as if to retch, and for once the death reek had nothing to do with it.

“Uh-huh.” Lou nodded. “And the real pisser is, they expect us to
believe
that crap. How dumb do they think we are?” He knew the answer to that: your average German—your average German with a guilty conscience—thought your average American was pretty goddamn dumb. By the way some U.S. officers were willing to use Nazis to help get the towns they were in charge of back on their feet, maybe your average German hit the nail right on the head, too.

“You gonna talk with the town councillor who was here?” Benton asked. “What the hell’s his handle, anyway?”

“Herpolsheimer,” Lou said with a certain gloomy relish. “Anton Herpolsheimer. Jeez, what a monicker. Yeah, I’ll talk to him. Don’t know what he would’ve seen that our GIs didn’t, but maybe something.”

Herr
Herpolsheimer’s house stood next to the post office on the Hugenottenplatz. Once upon a time, the Germans had taken in persecuted French Protestants instead of clobbering them. Worth remembering they could do such things…Lou supposed.

“Hey, Joe, got any gum?” a kid maybe eight or nine years old called in pretty fair English as Lou and Sergeant Benton neared the house. Benton ignored him. Lou shook his head. He wasn’t feeling sympathetic to Germans, even little ones, right then. The kid dropped back into German for an endearment: “Stinking Yankee kikes!”

“Lick my ass, you little shitface,” Lou Weissberg growled in the same language. “Get the fuck out of here before I give you a noodle”—German slang for a bullet in the back of the neck. He might have done it, too; his hand dropped toward the .45 on his belt before he even thought.

The kid turned white—no, green. How many uncomprehended insults had he got away with? He damn well didn’t get away with this one. He disappeared faster than a V-2 blasting off.

“Wow!” Benton said admiringly. “What did you call him?”

“About a quarter of what he deserved.” Lou pushed on, his thin face closed tight. The ordnance sergeant had the sense not to push him.

Lou took some satisfaction in banging on Anton Herpolsheimer’s front door. If the town councillor thought the American
Gestapo
was here to grill him…it wouldn’t break Lou’s heart.

When the door didn’t open fast enough to suit him, he banged some more, even louder. “We gonna kick it down?” Sergeant Benton didn’t sound bothered.

“If we need to.” By then Lou looked forward to it.

But the door swung wide then. A tiny, ancient woman in a black dress—housekeeper?—squinted up at the two Americans. “You wish…?” she asked in a rusty voice, as politely as if they were holding teacups with extended pinkies.

“We must see
Herr
Herpolsheimer at once,” Lou said. If she tried to stall, she’d be sorry, and so would the councillor with the funny name.

But she didn’t. She nodded and said, “
Jawohl, mein Herr.
Please wait. I will bring him.” Then she hurried away.

“
‘Jawohl,’
huh?” Sergeant Benton didn’t know much German, but he followed that. “The way she talks, Lieutenant, you’re one heap big honcho.”

“I should be—not ’cause I’m me, but ’cause I’m an American,” Lou said. “We tell these German frogs to hop, they’d better be on the way up before they ask, ‘How high?’”

“Now you’re talkin’!” Benton said enthusiastically. Lou nudged him—here came Councillor Herpolsheimer.

Nobody’d told Lou that the bomber had wounded Herpolsheimer. But the old German walked with a limp. His left arm was in a sling. An almost clean bandage was wrapped around his head. “Good day,
Herr
Herpolsheimer,” Lou said, more politely than he’d expected to. “I’m here to ask some questions about the, ah, unfortunate events of the other day.”

“Unfortunate events? I should say so!” Herpolsheimer had a gray mustache and bushy gray eyebrows. (Lou could see only one of them, but the other was bound to look the same.) The old German added, “That maniac!”

“Do you know who he was? Had you seen him before?” Lou asked.

“No. Never.” Herpolsheimer winced a little as he shook his head. Maybe he had a concussion to go with his more obvious injuries. He said, “I fought in the last war. That’s where I got this.” He used his good hand to brush his leg, so he’d had the limp before he went out to watch the Yanks play baseball. The gesture was oddly dignified, almost courtly. “I fought in the last war,” he repeated. “No one back then would have done such a thing—not a German, not a Frenchman, not an Englishman. Nobody. Not even an American.” He seemed to remind himself what his interrogator was.

“Danke schön,”
Lou said dryly. “How about a Russian?”

“Well, I fought in Flanders, so I didn’t face them,” the town councillor replied. “But I never heard of them doing anything like that.”

“Do you think the fellow who blew himself up was a German?” Lou inquired.

“Until he did…that, I didn’t pay much attention to him,”
Herr
Herpolsheimer said slowly. “I might have paid more had I thought he was a foreigner. But he didn’t seem to stand out. Oh, he looked like someone who’d been through a lot, but a lot of people look like that nowadays.” He stuck out his wattled chin, as if to say,
And it’s all your fault, too.

Lou didn’t think it was all the Allies’ fault. If Hitler hadn’t swallowed Austria, raped Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland, invaded Denmark and Norway, invaded the Low Countries and France, bombed the crap out of England, sunk everything he could in the North Atlantic, invaded the Balkans and North Africa, and then invaded Russia…
Details, details,
Lou thought.

But arguing politics with a Jerry was a waste of time. “It seemed like this guy, whoever he was, placed himself to hurt as many Americans as he could before he, uh, exploded himself.” That wasn’t supposed to be a reflexive verb, but nobody’d had to talk much about human bombs before.

Herr
Herpolsheimer understood him, which was the point of the exercise. The old man nodded. “Yes, I thought so. He did it with definite military effect.”

“Wunderbar,”
Lou muttered. If he’d been speaking English, he would have said
Terrific
the same way.

Herpolsheimer eyed him. “Your German is quite good,
Herr Oberleutnant,
but I do not think I have heard an accent quite like yours before.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Half the time, it isn’t German, or isn’t exactly German—it’s Yiddish.” Lou waited.
Come on, you old bastard. Let’s hear the speech about how you didn’t know what those wicked Nazis were doing to the Jews here. No, you had no idea at all.

The town councillor clicked his tongue between his teeth. “My niece had a Jewish husband,” he said after a moment.

“Had?” Lou didn’t like the sound of that.

“Max hanged himself in 1939, after
Kristallnacht,
” Herpolsheimer said. “He could not get a visa to any foreign country, and he could not live here. In his note, he said he did not wish to be a burden on Luisa. She did not believe he was one—but, the way things went, she might have come to do so….”

What were you supposed to say after something like that? Lou couldn’t think of anything, so he got out of there as fast as he could. Then he had to tell Sergeant Benton what Herpolsheimer had said, which made him feel great all over again. “Son of a bitch,” the ordnance sergeant said when he got done. “
Son
of a bitch. Ain’t that a bastard?”

“
Mazeltov,
Toby,” Lou said. “That may be the understatement of the year.”

“Hot damn,” Benton said. “So what the hell are we going to do about this asshole who turned himself into a bomb?”

“What you said, pretty much—hope he’s one lone nut and there’s no more like him,” Lou answered. “Past that, I have no idea—I mean, none. And I may be breaking security to tell you the higher-ups don’t, either, but I don’t think I’m surprising you much.”

“Nope,” Sergeant Benton said. “I only wish to God you were.”

T
HE EXPLOSION HAD TAKEN OUT MOST OF A CITY BLOCK.
T
HE DAMAGE
wasn’t so obvious in fallen Berlin. The lost capital of the
Reich
had already taken more bombs and shells and rockets and small-arms fire than any town this side of Stalingrad. After all that, what difference did one more explosion make?

Captain Vladimir Bokov knew too well the difference this one explosion made. The bloodstains on still-standing walls and on the battered pavement were noticeably fresher than most in Berlin. And he could also make out bits and pieces of the GMC truck some clever German had packed with explosives before driving it up to some parading Russian soldiers and blowing them up—and himself with them.

“You see, Comrade Captain,” Colonel Fyodor Furmanov said. He’d led those parading Red Army troops. Only dumb luck no flying piece of truck got him in the kidneys—or in the back of the neck. He had burns and scrapes and bruises, nothing worse…and he seemed embarrassed to remain alive while so many of his soldiers didn’t.

“Oh, yes. I see,” the NKVD man said. Colonel Furmanov flinched. He knew his next stop might be a labor camp somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. “What kind of precautions did you take to keep that truck from getting close to your men?”

Furmanov flinched again. Bokov eyed the decorations on his chest. They said the Red Army officer had had himself a busy war. He spread his hands now. “Comrade Captain, I took none. The responsibility is mine. I thought the war was over. I thought no one would strike at us. I was wrong—and my poor men paid the price for my mistake.”

“You didn’t expect that the Fascist would be willing to blow himself up if that meant he could strike at the Soviet Union?” Bokov asked.

“No,” Colonel Furmanov said stonily. “If you believe what the Yankees are saying, the Japanese fight like that. But the Germans don’t—didn’t, I should say. Not before the surrender, they didn’t. You must know that as well as I do, Comrade Captain.”

His words said the right things. His tone said he doubted whether an NKVD man knew anything about what had gone on at the front—but didn’t say so blatantly enough to let Bokov call him on it. Abstractly, the captain admired the performance. The only way he could respond to the challenge was by pretending not to notice it. And so he simply nodded and said, “Yes. I do know.”

“Well, then.” Colonel Furmanov sighed. He’d been right to come out and accept responsibility. It would have landed on him anyhow. Being ready for it made him…look a little better.

Bokov lit another of his American cigarettes. When he handed Furmanov the pack, the older officer stared in surprise before taking it. Furmanov leaned close to get a light from Bokov’s cigarette. After giving it to him, the NKVD man spoke slowly and deliberately: “It seems, Comrade Colonel—it seems, I say—that some Nazis have decided to continue resistance in spite of the regime’s formal surrender. This bomb in the truck…is not an isolated incident.”

He didn’t want to admit that. Coming out and saying it made the USSR—and, maybe even more to the point, the NKVD—look bad. Easier by far to let this officer vanish into the gulag. Maybe he’d come out in ten years, or more likely twenty-five. Or maybe they would use him up before he finished his sentence, the way they did with so many.

If this were an isolated incident, Furmanov would be gone. As things were, though…“There are reports from the American occupation zone of Germans using explosives to kill U.S. soldiers—and killing themselves in the process.”