The Man with the Iron Heart (55 page)

Diana looked at the people on the pier in a new way. Most of them, like her, had been born in the nineteenth century. And those were definitely twentieth-century men on the ship. “I suppose they would,” she admitted, which made the man from the
Times
blink. “But if we weren’t here, they wouldn’t see anybody at all. That would be wrong, no matter what Truman thinks. So here we are.”

She wasn’t quite right. At the base of the pier stood a big olive-drab tent, with MPs flanking it. A sign above the open flap said U.S. ARMY DEPROCESSING CENTER, and, in smaller letters just below,
ENTRY REQUIRED
. Of course there would be paperwork to finish before soldiers could set foot in the United States again. But the soldiers or clerks or clerk/soldiers inside the tent weren’t what a returning GI wanted to see and hear.

The tugboats pulled away from a Liberty ship. Sailors pushed through the soldiers so they could lower the gangplank. The far end thudded down onto the pier. The young men in olive-drab cheered and whooped.

“Welcome home!” Diana and the rest of the welcomers shouted, waving their flags. “Welcome back!”

Still in neat Army single file, the soldiers tramped past them toward the deprocessing center. “Who are you folks, anyways?” one of them asked.

“We’re the people who got you out of Germany, that’s who,” Diana answered proudly. Moses might have told the children of Israel
I’m the person who got you out of Egypt
in the same tone of voice.

And the way the returning soldier’s face lit up told her she hadn’t wasted her time with him. “Much obliged, ma’am!” he exclaimed, and marched on.

Several other young men thanked the welcomers, too. But a skinny kid with curly brown hair and a nose like the business end of a churchkey opener stopped in front of Diana and said, “You’re Mrs. McGraw, aren’t you?”

Diana smiled. “That’s right,” she said, not without pride.

“Well, you can
geh kak afen yam,
” the kid told her. She didn’t know what it meant, but it didn’t sound like a compliment. And it wasn’t, because the soldier went on, “You’ve gone and messed up the whole country, that’s what you’ve done. We need to be in Germany. We need to stay there. If the Nazis grab it again, that’ll be the worst thing in the world.”

“We aren’t stopping the Nazis,” Diana said.

“We sure were slowing ’em down,” the soldier said. “Once we’re all gone—”

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “All we were doing—are doing—over there is bleeding for no reason.” She’d had this argument dozens of times before. She was ready to have it again. Ready? She was eager.

And so was the returning GI. “It’s not for nothing,” he insisted hotly. “It’s—”

The guy behind him, who was half again his size, gave him a shove and cut him off. “C’mon, Izzy. Move it, man. This ain’t the place for politics. I wanna go get my Ruptured Duck, darn it.” Having ladies around kept even most soldiers talking clean.

Izzy plainly thought it was a perfect place for politics. But the momentum of the crowd swept him down the pier. He was bound for the deprocessing center whether he wanted to go there or not.

Hearing what the bigger soldier called him made a light go on in Diana’s head. “Oh,” she said. “I should’ve known.”

Several of the New York–based activists nodded wisely. “You can’t expect those people to be reasonable,” a man said. The New Yorkers nodded again, almost in unison.

“Well,” Diana said, and then, a beat later, “Most regular Americans appreciate what we’re doing, anyway.”

“I should hope so!” the man agreed. He waved his flag. More and more soldiers coming home from Germany clumped by them.

H
ANS
K
LEIN HAD SET THE
I
NTERNATIONAL
H
ERALD
-T
RIBUNE
RIGHT IN
the middle of Reinhard Heydrich’s desk. The picture on the front page was plenty to seize the
Reichsprotektor
’s attention. There was a long file of marching U.S. soldiers, photographed with New York City’s skyscrapers in the background.
GIS
LEAVING OCCUPATION DUTY
, the headline read. Heydrich stared and stared. A picture of a beautiful woman was nothing next to this. He hadn’t felt so splendid since…when?

Since that Czech’s gun jammed.
More than five years ago now,
he thought, wonder filling him. So much had happened since, so very much. Not all of it was what he’d expected. Not much of it was what he’d wanted. And so many things had yet to happen. The
Reich
and the Party
would
be redeemed.

Klein came in. Had he been skulking in the corridor, waiting for Heydrich to pick up the marvelous newspaper? His grin said he had. “How about that?” he said.

“How about that?” Heydrich echoed, and his thin lips also shaped a smile. “Like so many whipped dogs, they’re running. Running!”

“That was the idea all along,” the
Oberscharführer
reminded him.

“Aber natürlich,”
Heydrich said. “But getting them to do it—! I thought we would have to keep going longer than this. But the Americans pulled as much as we pushed. More! We never came close to hurting them enough to make them go.”

“And the American government didn’t shoot those people marching and squawking,” Klein said. “I’m damned if I understand why not.”

Since Heydrich didn’t, either, he only shrugged. “You use your enemy’s weaknesses against him. That’s the whole idea in war. That’s how we beat France. We made a big, showy threat in Holland and Belgium, and the French and English couldn’t run fast enough to fight there. Then the real thrust came through the Ardennes, where France was weak, and the
Wehrmacht
paraded under the
Arc de Triomphe.
”

“The French won’t want to get out of their zone now,” Hans Klein predicted.

“Yes, I know.” That France had an occupation zone in Germany still infuriated Heydrich. The USA, the UK, the USSR—they’d earned the right to try to hold down the
Reich,
anyhow. But what had the French done? Ridden on other people’s coattails, and damn all else. The
Reichsprotektor
pulled his thoughts back to what needed doing next. “Now that the Amis are going, I don’t think the Tommies will stick around much longer. England isn’t what it used to be. When America spits, the English go swimming.”

“I like that.” Klein grinned again.

“And if we hold two zones”—Heydrich pursued his own train of thought—“we have enough of the
Reich
to do something worthwhile with. Not the
Grossdeutsches Reich,
maybe, but a
Deutsches Reich
again.”

“I like that, too.” But Hans Klein hadn’t finished, for he asked, “How much will the Russians like it, though?”

Automatically, Heydrich’s head swung toward the east. Here deep underground, directions should have been meaningless. For all practical purposes, they were. All the same, Heydrich might have had a compass implanted behind his eyes. He knew from which direction the Red Army would come if it came.

“They won’t like it,” he admitted. “Even so, I don’t think they’ll invade as long as we walk soft for a while once we get in.”

“They’d better not—that’s all I’ve got to say,” Klein replied. “We sure as hell can’t stop ’em if they do.”

Heydrich grunted. “I know,” he said gruffly. “Believe me, trading the Amis for the Ivans is the last thing I want.” And wasn’t that the sad and sorry truth? The German freedom fighters had probably hurt the Russians worse than they’d hurt the Americans. But the Red Army wasn’t going away, dammit. The Russians hunkered down in their occupation zone and fought back.

“Well,
Herr Reichsprotektor,
what do we do about it, then?” Klein turned Heydrich’s title into a sour joke. What good was a
Reichsprotektor
who couldn’t protect the
Reich
?

“My bet is, the Americans won’t let Stalin move all the way to the Rhine,” Heydrich answered. “They look weak leaving Germany themselves. They won’t be able to afford to look weak twice in a row here, especially not when the Reds in China are kicking the crap out of the Nationalists. All we have to do is make sure we look like the lesser of two evils.”

Hitler never had figured that out. Right up to the end, he’d expected the Anglo-Americans to join him in the crusade against Bolshevism. But he’d scared them even worse than Stalin did. And so…Heydrich led the resistance from a hidden mineshaft God only knew how many meters underground.

Klein threw back his head and laughed like a loon. “Sweet suffering Jesus, sir, but that’s funny! We make the Americans run away, and then we use them to keep the Russians from coming in? Oh, my!” He laughed some more.

“It is strange, I know. It should work, though, if we play our cards right. Or do you see it differently?” Heydrich asked. A couple of Foreign Ministry staffers were down here to advise him on such things. He’d talked with them. But he also respected Klein’s judgment. The Foreign Ministry people had brains and education. Klein thought with his gut and the plain good sense that made him win money whenever he sat down to play skat or poker. You needed the whole bunch if you were going to get anywhere.

The
Oberscharführer
considered. “Yeah, we might bring that off if we’re careful. The Ivans are scared of the atom bomb.”

“Hell, so am I,” Heydrich said. “As soon as we’re able to, we get our own. And we have to get to work on our rockets again, too. Once we can blow Moscow and Washington off the map—”

“We’re back in business,” Klein finished for him.

“Damn right we are,” Heydrich agreed.

V
LADIMIR
B
OKOV NEITHER SPOKE NOR UNDERSTOOD
E
NGLISH.
H
E
had no trouble at all with German, though. All the Berlin papers, those from the Russian zone and the ones printed in the zones the other Allies held, were full of news and pictures of the American pullout. He wouldn’t have believed it if he weren’t seeing it with his own eyes. Even seeing, he had trouble believing.

“They’re going, Comrade Colonel!” he mourned. “The stupid motherfuckers are really going. Is that why we handed them the DP?”

“We handed them the DP so General Vlasov could bust our balls with it for the rest of our lives,” Moisei Shteinberg answered. “He’ll do it, too—he’s just the type.”

“Too right he is!” Bokov was gloomily aware he was the one who’d pushed hardest for working with the Americans. He wouldn’t be the only one who remembered, either. Everybody who wanted to get ahead of him and everybody who wanted to hold him down would throw it in his face. After a while, nobody would have to. The whole world—the whole world of the NKVD, anyhow, which was the only world that mattered to him—would know he was a fuckup.

“Both the officers who took Birnbaum were Jews, you said. If anything gives me hope, that does,” Shteinberg said. “They’ll push things.”

“I’m sure they want Heydrich’s scalp, Comrade Colonel. But how much will they be able to do when everything’s going to pieces around them?
Bozhemoi!
You can’t even be sure they’re still on this side of the ocean,” Bokov said.

“Don’t remind me.” Shteinberg scowled. “I just wish I could know we’d take care of things ourselves once the Americans all disappear.”

“What’s to stop us?” Bokov demanded. “If the Fascists grab power in the western zones, of course we’ll run them out and kill as many of them as we can. They can’t even slow us down—we’d be on the Rhine in a week.”

“Of course we would, if we were only fighting the Heydrichites,” Moisei Shteinberg said. “But the Americans don’t want us on the Rhine. Neither do the French.”

“Fuck the French! Fuck the Americans, too.” The first part of what Bokov said came out fiercely. His voice faltered when he tried the second curse.

Colonel Shteinberg gave back a sad nod. “You begin to see what I mean. The French are nothing…by themselves. But the Americans are a different story. You can despise them, but you can’t ignore them. They have those damned bombs, and they have the big bombers that can carry them into the motherland. If they say, ‘No, you can’t do this,’ then we can’t, not till we have atom bombs of our own.”

“Fuck the Americans!” Bokov said again, this time as savagely as he wanted to. “Fuck them in the ass! If they walk away from their worry when it’s our worry, too, and then they don’t let us clean it up—”

“Yes? What then? What can we do about it?” Shteinberg asked.

“Those bastards,” Bokov whispered, in lieu of admitting the Soviet Union couldn’t do a damn thing. “Those cocksucking bastards. They have to want to see the Fascists reestablish themselves. If they walk out and they don’t let us walk in…What other explanation is there?” Bokov had made a career out of looking for plots against the USSR. He didn’t need to look very hard to see one here.

“Do you know what the really mad thing is, Volodya?” Shteinberg said.

“Everything!” Bokov raged.

“No. The really mad thing is that every intelligence report I’ve seen says the American officers here in Germany don’t want to leave. The soldiers do, but who cares what soldiers think? The officers are all furious.
They
don’t want to see the Nazi monster come back to life. Neither does Truman. He fought against the Germans in the last war.”

Bokov figured Truman had basically the same powers as Stalin’s. “Then he should arrest the fools who are screwing up his policies. Do they
want
to fight three German wars?”

“They don’t think they’ll have to. They’ve got the bomb, and they’ve got those planes, and they think that’s all they’ll ever need,” Shteinberg answered.

“Truman should drop the bomb on them, then,” Bokov said. “Why doesn’t he put them all behind barbed wire, or else two meters down in the ground?”

“Americans are soft. Would they be walking away from Germany if they weren’t?” Shteinberg said. “Not always—they fought well enough before the surrender.”

“Took them long enough to do it,” Bokov said scornfully. He’d heard that the Americans lost only 400,000 dead against Germany and Japan combined. For the Red Army, that was a campaign, not a war.