The Man with the Iron Heart (52 page)

“Don’t bother buttering me up,
zhid,
” Vlasov said. “Nothing but a waste of time.”

“However you please…sir.” Moisei Shteinberg held his voice under tight control. “My next move, if you keep dicking around with us, is to write to Marshal Beria and let him know how you’re obstructing the struggle against the Heydrichite bandits.”

“You wouldn’t dare!” General Vlasov bellowed.

“Yes, I would. I’ve already done it,” Shteinberg said. “And if anything happens to me, the letter goes to Moscow anyway. I’ve taken care of that, too…sir.”

“Fuck your mother hard!”

“Maybe my father did,” Shteinberg answered calmly. “But at least I know who he was…sir.”

Could looks have killed, Yuri Vlasov would have shouted for men to come and drag two corpses out of his office. Bokov wondered whether the general would try something more direct. He also wondered how much good this move would do him and Shteinberg even if they turned out to be right. He shrugged, with luck invisibly. If it helped the fight against Heydrich’s bandits, he’d worry about everything else later.

“All right. All right.” Vlasov spat the words in Shteinberg’s face. “Take this other kike to the Americans, then. Go ahead. Be my guest. They’ll probably be a bunch of Jews, too. As far as I’m concerned—” He broke off, breathing hard.

“Yes, sir?” Shteinberg’s voice was polite, even curious. Bokov was curious, too. What had Vlasov swallowed? Something like
As far as I’m concerned, Hitler knew what he was doing with you people
? Bokov wouldn’t have been surprised. Plenty of his fellow-Russians felt that way. He didn’t love Jews himself. But you could damn well count on them to be anti-Fascist.

No matter how much rope Shteinberg fed Vlasov, the NKVD general was too canny to hang himself. “Go on,” he barked. “If you’re going to do it, go do it—and get the devil out of here.”

“If it works, he’ll take the credit,” Bokov warned once they were safely outside NKVD headquarters.

“Oh, sure,” Shteinberg agreed. “But he’d do that anyway.” Bokov laughed, not that his superior was joking—or wrong.

“A
YE,”
J
ERRY
D
UNCAN SAID.

“Mr. Duncan votes aye,” Joe Martin intoned, and the Clerk of the House recorded his vote. They weren’t going to be able to override President Truman’s veto of the bill that cut off funds for the U.S. occupation of Germany. They had a solid majority, including most Republicans and the growing number of Democrats who saw that staying on Truman’s side was lucky not to have cost them their jobs in the last election and that it damn well would get them tossed out next time around. A good majority, yes, but not a two-thirds majority.
Too bad,
Jerry thought.

The roll call droned on. Sure enough, when it finally finished, they fell twenty-two votes short of ramming the budget down the President’s throat. “Mr. Truman has put himself on record as saying he will not sign a War Department appropriation without money for continuing the occupation of Germany,” Speaker Martin said after announcing the results. “I want to put the House of Representatives on record, too. We will not send him an appropriations bill with that item in it.”

Members of the majority, Jerry Duncan loud among them, clapped their hands and cheered. Several Congressmen shouted “Hear! Hear!” as if they belonged to the House of Commons in London. People who’d voted against the override booed. Some of them shook their fists. Jerry couldn’t remember seeing that kind of bad behavior here. Everybody’s temper was frayed. Maybe things had been like this in the runup to the Civil War. The trial of wills over the occupation was tearing the country apart now.

“Order! We will have order!” The Speaker thumped his gavel. “The Sergeant at Arms has the authority to take whatever steps may prove necessary to restore order,” Joe Martin continued. The Democrats—and a handful of pro-occupation Republicans—went on booing. He banged the gavel again. Something like order slowly returned.

Out of it, Sam Rayburn bawled, “Mr. Speaker!
Mr. Speaker!
”

Had Jerry been up there in the Speaker’s seat, he wouldn’t have recognized the Texas Democrat. When Rayburn was Speaker of the House, he’d made a point of ignoring people whose views he didn’t fancy. That was one of the perquisites the Speaker enjoyed, and few Speakers had enjoyed it more than Rayburn.

But Joe Martin said, “The distinguished gentleman from Texas has the floor.” He clung to courtesy even as it collapsed around him.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker.” Rayburn could also be courtly when he felt like it—and he could be an iron-assed son of a bitch when he didn’t. He sounded slightly surprised. Had he expected Martin to pretend not to hear him? It looked that way to Jerry Duncan. Any which way, Rayburn went on, “You do realize, Mr. Speaker, that if you refuse to give the War Department the money it needs to keep holding down the Nazis, you will force us out of Germany in spite of the President’s conviction, and the U.S. Army’s, that we need to stay there?”

“Yes, Mr. Rayburn, I realize that. And that is the point, after all. In their wisdom, the framers of the Constitution gave Congress the purse strings. Not the President. Not the U.S. Army. Congress. If the President and the Army prove unwise, as they have here, we have the responsibility to exercise wisdom for them,” Joe Martin said.

“Hear! Hear!” This time, Jerry shouted it at the top of his lungs. He was far from the only Representative who did. Opponents of cutting off funds for the occupation yelled back. People on both sides took off their jackets and tossed them aside, as if expecting they’d be brawling in the aisles any second.

“Order! There will be order!” the Speaker of the House insisted loudly. The microphone made each blow of his gavel sound like a gunshot. After what had happened to poor Gus van Slyke—whom he’d known for years—Jerry wished that comparison hadn’t leaped into his mind, but it was the only one that seemed to fit. Also as if using a gun, Martin aimed a forefinger at Sam Rayburn. “The gentleman from Texas may continue—without, I hope, any undue outbursts this time.”

“I hope the same, Mr. Speaker. And I do thank you for recollecting I had the floor,” Rayburn said. “You say you and those who agree with you aim to stop the President and the Army from acting unwisely.”

“I say just that, sir, and it is the truth,” Joe Martin replied. Jerry Duncan nodded vehemently.

“Okay. Fine. You have—the Congress has—this high and fancy responsibility.” Rayburn waited.

The Speaker of the House waved in agreement. “I say that also, and it too is the truth.”

“All right, then. Here is my question for you: what happens when you exercise that responsibility and it turns out to be the biggest mistake since Eve listened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden?” Sam Rayburn demanded ferociously. “President Truman likes the saying ‘The buck stops here.’ When something goes wrong, he admits it. When the blame lands on you—and it will, Mr. Speaker, it will—when it lands on you, I say, will you be man enough to shoulder it?”

“If that happens, which I do not expect—” Speaker Martin began.

“Fools never do.” Rayburn planted the barb with obvious relish.

Bang!
went the gavel. “You are out of order, as you know very well.”

“So is the House—the inmates are taking over the asylum.”

Bang! Bang!
“Enough!” Joe Martin snapped. Rayburn sat down, grinning. Business resumed. Jerry wished the Texan hadn’t asked such a prickly question.

President Truman had a high, raspy, annoying voice. Diana McGraw had never really thought of it that way till after Pat got killed, but she sure did now. Of course, for the past couple of years Truman had been saying things she didn’t like and didn’t agree with. That made a difference, whether she thought so or not.

“We will carry the President’s radio address live at the top of the hour,” the radio announcer said, sounding as proud as if Truman were Moses about to read the brand new Ten Commandments on his station.

Even stolid Ed snorted at the fellow’s tone. “Are we supposed to get excited, or what? It’s not like Truman can do a Fireside Chat or anything.”

“Not likely!” Diana exclaimed. “When FDR said something, you wanted to believe him. Whenever Truman opens his mouth, you know he’s going to lie to you. That’s all he knows how to do.”

The radio filled up most of the time till the top of the hour with commercials. In a way, Diana supposed that was good: it meant there were plenty of things to buy again. During the war, a lot of normal stuff had been unavailable—and a lot of ads went away. Diana had to admit she hadn’t missed them. Now the stuff was back, and so were the pitchmen trying to convince people it was wonderful. Everybody knew the war was over…except the stubborn Missouri mule—no, jackass—in the White House.

At last, and precisely as if he were selling soap or cigarettes, the announcer said, “And here is the President of the United States!”

A long electric hiss. A burst of static, cut off almost instantly. Then Harry Truman’s voice came out of the radio speaker: “Good evening, my fellow citizens. The Nazis still lurking in Germany have proved again how dangerous they are. Laughing at the very idea of justice, they flew a C-47 into the building where their captured leaders would have gotten a fairer trial than any they gave their countless victims. This C-47 was hijacked in the air. As best we can determine, the American pilot and copilot were both callously murdered. The Nazis seem to have been able to smuggle extra explosives onto the airplane. We are still investigating how they did it.”

“Because somebody who should’ve kept his eyes open was asleep at the…darn switch,” Ed McGraw said. “Anybody can see that.”

If anybody can see it, why did you say it?
Diana wondered—one more thought she wouldn’t have had before a death in Germany turned things upside down and inside out for her. All she said out loud was a quick, “Hush. I want to hear him.”

“Much as we wish they weren’t, the Nazi fanatics are still dangerous,” Truman went on. “Because they are, our soldiers need to stay in Germany until we can be sure the country will stay peaceful and democratic—that’s ‘democratic’ with a small ‘d’—after we go home.”

“They wouldn’t be fighting if we weren’t there to give them big, fat, juicy targets!” Diana burst out.

“Some people will say the fanatics wouldn’t still be fighting if we weren’t in Germany,” Truman said, as if he were sitting in the kitchen with the McGraws.

Ed chuckled and lit a cigarette. “They oughta put you in the White House, babe.”

“How could I do worse?” Diana said. “It wouldn’t be easy.”

“The Republican Party in Congress seems to feel that way,” Truman said.

“Not just Republicans! Not even close!” Diana said hotly.

“It would be nice if the world were so simple. Or it would be nice if the Republicans weren’t so simple.” Truman wouldn’t—didn’t—miss a chance to throw darts at the opposition. “But the fact is, the Nazis have a long history of attacking anybody and everybody they can reach. The world knows that, to its sorrow.”

“We’ve got the atom bomb. They don’t,” Diana said.

“If we run away from Germany, the first thing the Nazis will do if they get back into power is start working on an atom bomb,” the President said. “They will deny it. They will swear on a stack of Bibles that they would never do anything like that. They told the same lies after World War I, and look what happened to the people who believed them then—the Lindberghs and the Liberty Lobby and the rest of the fools.

“And the second thing the Nazis will do if, God forbid, they get back into power is start working on a rocket that can reach the United States from Germany,” Truman said. “They had one on the drawing board when V-E Day came and made them shelve their plans. If they build a transatlantic rocket with an atom bomb in its nose, nobody is safe any more. Nobody. Not a single soul. Not anywhere in the world.”

“Yeah, yeah, enough with the Buck Rogers bull…manure,” Ed said. “If pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas.” Diana smiled at him. He might not be exciting, but his heart was in the right place. His head, too.

“Do the Republicans in Congress see that?” Harry Truman answered his own question: “They don’t. They might as well be ostriches, not elephants, the way they’ve stuck their heads in the sand. They flat-out refuse to put any money in the budget for keeping our armed forces in Germany. Without money, we will have to start bringing troops home.”

“Good!” Diana said. “That’s the idea! We should have done it a long time ago. If we had, maybe…Pat’d still be alive.” Her voice roughened at the last few words; she still couldn’t talk about him without wanting to cry.

“I know, hon,” Ed said softly, and he sounded husky, too.

There on the radio, Truman kept chattering away: “An old proverb talks about being penny wise and pound foolish. It’s so old, it goes back to the days before our independence. Nowadays, we’d understand it better if it talked about penny wise and dollar foolish. The point of it is, you’re making a mistake if you only worry about what’s right in front of you and not about what happens half a mile or a mile or five miles farther down the road. And that’s exactly what the Republicans who are starving our forces in Germany are doing.”

“My…heinie!” Diana had heard an awful lot of bad language the past couple of years. She’d used more of it herself than she ever did before. But she still tried not to when Ed could hear her.

He chuckled now, knowing—of course!—what she hadn’t said. “Way to go, babe. You tell ’em.”

“They won’t listen to me,” Truman said sadly.

“That’s ’cause they’ve got better sense than you do!” Diana also had a lot of practice talking back to politicians on the radio.

This time, the President didn’t seem to listen to her. “Trouble is, they’re Republicans, and that just naturally means they aren’t what you’d call good at listening,” he continued. “All the same, they’d better hear this, and hear it loud and clear. If they make us clear out of Germany, if they make us leave long before we really ought to, what happens afterwards is their fault. They’ll be responsible for it. I know the situation we have now isn’t very pretty. What we’ll get if we go their way will be worse. And they will be to blame for it.”

A Bronx cheer didn’t count as cussing. Diana sent the radio the wettest, juiciest raspberry she could. Ed laughed out loud.

“I wish I didn’t have to tell you things like this,” Harry Truman said. “But, unlike some people I could name, my job is to tell you what’s so, not what sounds good or what might get me a few extra votes. Thanks. Good night.”

“That was the President of the United States, Harry S Truman,” the announcer said, as if anybody in his right mind didn’t already know.

“He’s full of…malarkey,” Diana declared as Ed turned off the radio.

Her husband laughed again. “You better believe it.” He bent down and gave her a kiss. Then he nuzzled her neck. “So to heck with him for a little while, anyways.”

“Yeah. To heck with him.” Diana went upstairs to the bedroom willingly enough. You needed to keep a man happy every so often. She didn’t have anything
against
Ed. When it was over and he turned on the nightstand lamp so he could find his cigarettes, he had a big, sloppy grin plastered across his face. Diana made herself smile, too. She’d just started to warm up when, too soon, it was over. Was that happening more and more these days, or was she simply noticing more?

Because she didn’t want to make Ed angry or upset, she didn’t say anything about it. He finished the cigarette, gave her a tobacco-flavored kiss, then got up to use the bathroom and brush his teeth. Five minutes later, he was snoring.

Diana lay there in the darkness. It should have been better than this, shouldn’t it? Once upon a time, it had been better than this, hadn’t it? Hadn’t it?

She was a long time sleeping.

L
OU
W
EISSBERG WONDERED WHAT THE HELL
B
RIGADIER
G
ENERAL
R.R.R. Baxter’s initials stood for. There they were, three R’s in a row on the nameplate on Baxter’s desk. Readin’, ’Ritin’, ’Rithmetic Baxter? It seemed as likely as anything else. A company-grade officer couldn’t very well come right out and ask a general something like that. Lou would just have to let his imagination run wild.

He glanced over at Howard Frank. Was the same burning question uppermost in Frank’s mind, too? The other Jewish officer didn’t seem to keep glancing at the nameplate the way Lou did. But did that mean anything?

Baxter had cold blue eyes that bifocals did nothing to warm up. He eyed Lou and Major Frank in turn. If either man impressed him, he hid it goddamn well.
Well, he doesn’t impress me, either,
Lou thought.
Except his initials.
A star on each shoulder put R.R.R. Baxter among the Lord’s anointed in the Counter-Intelligence Corps. He wouldn’t give a rat’s ass whether he impressed a lonely subordinate or not.

“How’s your German, boys?” he asked in that language. His own
Deutsch
had a strong American accent, but he was plenty fluent.

“
Ganz gut, Herr
General,” Howard Frank said. Lou nodded.

“Figured as much, but I wanted to make sure. From what I hear, German will work well enough,” Baxter said.

“Well enough for what, sir?” Lou paused, filled by a hope he hardly dared believe. “Has the Red Army finally decided to work with us?”

“Not the Red Army,” Baxter replied, and Lou’s hope crashed and burned. Then it rose phoenixlike from the flames, for the CIC big wheel went on, “The NKVD. The Russians wanted to try the top Nazis in their zone in Berlin ’cause we screwed it up twice. If they did it right, they figured they could score propaganda points off of us. Well, they ended up with egg on their face, too. They don’t like that any better than we would. They’re proud people.”

“After what they went through against the Germans, pride’s about all they’ve got left,” Lou remarked.

“Pride and most of Eastern Europe,” R.R.R. Baxter pointed out. “But, yeah, I know what you mean. They paid for everything they got—paid in blood. Now they’ve got something they can’t use themselves. That’s all I know about it. Right this minute, that’s all anybody who isn’t a Russian knows about it. Your job is to find out what it is and what we can do with it.”

“Why us, sir?” Frank asked. “Why not somebody with more clout?”

“For one thing, you’ve both been heard to say we ought to work more with the Russians,” Brigadier General Baxter answered. Lou blinked. He had said things like that. How closely were people here monitored, though, if the higher-ups knew he’d said it? Well, that one answered itself, didn’t it? Baxter went on, “And the Russians don’t want to make a big deal out of this. If it doesn’t work out, the blame won’t land on them—that’s our best guess. So they don’t want anything more than a midlevel contact. Not yet, anyhow. You’re it, the two of you…if you’re game, of course.”

If you aren’t, you’re nothing but a couple of gutless, worthless pieces of shit.
Baxter didn’t say that, but he didn’t have to. One other thing he might not have said was
a couple of gutless, worthless Jewish pieces of shit.
Maybe such a rude, unfair thought never once crossed his mind. Maybe. But plenty of American officers still had their doubts about Jews in spite of Hitler.

Which was why Lou said, “Oh, hell, yes, sir!” as fast as he could—but no faster than Howard Frank said, “You’d better believe it, sir!”

R.R.R. Baxter nodded smoothly. He wasn’t a general for nothing, Lou realized—he knew how to get people to do what he wanted. He sure did. “Glad to hear it, gentlemen,” he said. “We’ll work out the details of the meeting with the Russians, and we’ll go from there.”

“C
OME ON,”
V
LADIMIR
B
OKOV SNAPPED AT
S
HMUEL.
“G
ET MOVING,
dammit.”

“I’m right here with you,” the Jewish DP said. “I’m not going any place but where you tell me to.”

“Too fucking right you’re not. You wouldn’t last long if you did,” Bokov said. Maybe there really were snipers with beads drawn on Shmuel’s gray head. Or maybe Bokov would have to plug him if he tried to bug out. The NKVD man didn’t know for sure. Shmuel couldn’t know, either.

Together, they crossed to the south side of the Wittenbergplatz. Whoever’d set up this meeting had an evil sense of humor. Captain Bokov suspected Yuri Vlasov was taking a measure of revenge for having his hand forced. The sign above the tavern proclaimed that it was Fent’s Establishment. And so it was…now. If you looked closely, though, under Fent’s name you could still make out the smeared letters that spelled out who the former proprietor had been.