The Man with the Iron Heart (57 page)

Bokov sprang to his feet with a foul-mouthed, furious shout of his own. Someone’s head would roll in the dust for that. The monument had been unveiled on November 7, 1945, to commemorate the anniversary of the October Revolution (a name that showed how the Julian calendar had complicated life in prerevolutionary Russia). It was made of marble from the wreckage of the
Reichs
Chancellery, and topped with a bronze of a Soviet soldier with bayoneted rifle flanked by what were supposed to have been the first two Red Army tanks into Berlin.

Colonel Shteinberg burst into Bokov’s office. “You heard?” the senior NKVD man asked.

“I heard,” Bokov agreed grimly. “Shall we go find out just what they did to it?”

“Not till we’re ordered to,” Shteinberg answered. “They’ve got that trick of using one blast to draw more people in, then touching off another one. Why run into a trap?”

“Well, you’re right,” Bokov said—the Heydrichites would try that whenever they thought they could get away with it. Something else occurred to him: “Would even two and a half tonnes of explosives blow up that monument?”

“Beats me,” Shteinberg said. “They wouldn’t do it any good, though.” He paused, his face suddenly thoughtful rather than angry or resigned. “Wait a minute. Didn’t you write the memo about alertness last year to make sure we protected that monument?”

“I did, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. Nobody would be able to claim he hadn’t done his part. Paperwork wasn’t just for giving enemies of the state what they deserved. If you’d served the Soviet Union the way you should have, and if you had the papers to prove it, you were bulletproof.

“But of course that
was
last year. No one could expect a unit to stay alert for a whole year.” Sarcasm dripped from Shteinberg’s voice like juice from a ripe peach after you took a bite. Then he paused again. “Of course, I don’t know if the same unit still has the duty. All the same, though, that memo went everywhere in the Soviet zone, didn’t it?”

“That’s what I heard, sir.” Bokov didn’t have the paperwork to prove it had, not at his beck and call. Somebody would. People could find out exactly where it had gone. If it was supposed to have gone everywhere and hadn’t, people could find out who’d dropped the ball.

A sergeant stuck his head into Bokov’s office. He looked relieved when he saw Moisei Shteinberg. “A telephone call for you, Comrade Colonel.”

“I’m coming.” Shteinberg hurried away. He came back about ten minutes later. Bokov couldn’t read his expression. The colonel asked, “Do you know—did you know—a lieutenant colonel named Surkov? A tanks officer?”

“Surkov…” Bokov had to think before he answered, “Wasn’t he one of the men with the armored regiment in the division that guarded the monument last year? I talked to him about…about tricks the Heydrichites might try.” It came back to him now. “Why, sir?”

“Because as soon as the monument went up, he took his service pistol out of the holster, stuck it in his mouth, and blew off the top of his head.”

“Oh…damnation,” Bokov muttered. Poor Surkov must have decided killing himself looked like a better bet than whatever the Red Army and the NKVD would do to him. He might not have been wrong, either. Remembering what he’d talked about with the newly dead officer, Bokov said, “Don’t tell me the Heydrichites used one of our tanks to get the explosives to the monument.”

Colonel Shteinberg jerked in surprise, then froze into catlike immobility. “How did you know that, Volodya, when I only found out about it myself just now?” he asked, his voice ominously quiet.

“I didn’t
know,
sir. But Surkov and I talked about that kind of trick. He knew it was a possibility. Or he knew a year ago. But he and his men must have slacked off and stopped worrying about it when nothing happened. Then something did—and he would’ve remembered he should’ve been on his toes. And since he wasn’t…” Bokov mimed shooting himself.

“I see. Yes, that makes good sense.” Colonel Shteinberg lifted his cap in salute. Mockingly? Bokov was damned if he could tell. Shteinberg went on, “Your deduction is fine indeed. You should be Sherlock Bokov, not Vladimir.”

Bokov had read his share of Sherlock Holmes stories in translation. Many Russians had; unlike so many English and American authors, Arthur Conan Doyle was ideologically inoffensive. All the same, he said, “How much good does it do to know who the criminal is when you can’t catch him because he’s blown himself to smithereens?”

“A point,” the senior NKVD officer admitted. “But only some of a point. These Fascist jackals run in packs. Sometimes the trail of one will lead you to the next.”

“Sometimes it will, yes, sir. Only sometimes it won’t.” Bokov hesitated, then hurried on so that what he said came from his mouth and not Shteinberg’s: “Doesn’t look like the Americans have done anything with that damned DP we gave them, for instance.” Shteinberg couldn’t blame him for that if he’d already blamed himself. He hoped Shteinberg couldn’t, anyhow.

The Jew stayed silent so long, Bokov started to worry. At last, though, Shteinberg said, “Don’t lose any sleep over that one, Volodya. If it doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t. But the world won’t end if one single solitary cat happens to land by a bowl of cream.”

Would he have said the same thing had the man they let go been an anti-Fascist German, not another Jew? Vladimir Bokov had his doubts. By the nature of things, he had to keep them to himself.

“And besides—” Shteinberg added, and not another word. But when he puffed out his cheeks, narrowed his eyes, and glowered, he did a remarkable impression of Lieutenant General Yuri Vlasov. Maybe there was a mike hidden in Bokov’s office, maybe not. There was no cinema camera. Nobody but the two of them would ever know he’d just wordlessly said they’d given the evil-tempered general a finger in the eye. And Bokov couldn’t prove a thing.

“If they stole a tank, they couldn’t have done it with one lone man,” Bokov said. “Did we know where they did it yet? Do we know how?”

“We may. I don’t.” Moisei Shteinberg sighed. “Something went wrong somewhere—you can count on that. We forgot about a machine, or we figured the Germans couldn’t make it start because we couldn’t, or a guard got drunk and passed out, or the Heydrichites knocked somebody over the head, or somebody who spoke Russian had forged papers, or…” He spread his hands as if to say he could go on.

Some of the schemes he proposed struck Bokov as more likely than others, but any one of them was possible. “Why do we fuck up like this all the time?” Bokov burst out.

“It’s not as though the rest of the Allies haven’t got bitten, too.” The other NKVD man gave such consolation as he could. “And the Germans lost the big war, so they aren’t immune, either.”

“What does that mean?” Bokov answered his own question: “The whole human race is fucked up, that’s what!”

One of Shteinberg’s dark eyebrows rose a few millimeters: “And this surprises you because…?”

J
OE
M
ARTIN NODDED TO
J
ERRY
D
UNCAN.
“T
HE CHAIR RECOGNIZES
the gentleman from Indiana,” the Speaker of the House said.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said. “I rise to discuss the administration’s flawed—no, I should say failed—policy in Germany.”

“You’ve got no right to do that,” Sam Rayburn growled from the other side of the aisle. “The administration can’t carry out its policy in Germany, because you people won’t let it. Running away and giving the place back to the Nazis is your policy, not the President’s.”

Bang!
Speaker Martin brought down his gavel with obvious relish. “The gentleman from Texas is out of order, as I am sure he knows perfectly well.”

“I’ll tell you what’s out of order,” Rayburn said. “This idiotic retreat you’re ramming down everybody’s throat is out of order, that’s what.”

Bang! Bang!
“That will be quite enough of that, Mr. Rayburn. Quite enough.” Martin often repeated himself for emphasis.
Diana McGraw does the same thing,
Jerry thought. Then he wondered if he did it himself without noticing. The Speaker of the House went on, “Mr. Duncan has the floor. You may continue, Mr. Duncan.”

“Thank you again, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said. “It’s nice to have somebody on my side up there. I’m still getting used to that.”

A ripple of laughter ran through the not especially crowded House chamber. Even Sam Rayburn smiled gruffly. While he was up on the dais, he hadn’t been on Jerry’s side, and he didn’t give two whoops in hell who knew it.

“We had the wrong troops in the wrong places, and they were trying to accomplish the wrong mission,” Jerry went on. “Other than that, everything was fine with President Truman’s policy.”

Most Republicans in the chamber applauded, along with the growing number of anti-occupation Democrats. Catcalls and boos rose from the pro-administration Democrats, and from the Republicans, mostly in the Northeast, who couldn’t see their way clear to agreeing with the majority in their own party.

“We tried everything we knew how to do. Did we manage to stop the German partisans, or even slow them down very much? We did not,” Jerry said. “No one’s been able to slow them down very much. The way they blew up the Russians’ monument in Berlin proves that. If the Russians can’t keep them from doing things like that, nobody’s going to be able to.”

The Russians are tough, evil bastards. They can do all the stuff we haven’t got the stomach to do ourselves.
Jerry didn’t come right out and put that in his speech, but it lay below and behind his words. By the way several Congressmen nodded, they heard what he wasn’t saying—heard it loud and clear.

“Isn’t it time we deal with what we’ve got instead of what we wish we had?” he asked. “Let the damned Nazis come out in the open—not because we love them, because we know they’re there. Once they are out in the open, they won’t be able to cause nearly so much trouble.”

“Tell it to Frankfurt,” Sam Rayburn said. “How many years before it’ll be fit for human beings to live there again?”

“Mr. Duncan has the floor,” the Speaker said, and used the gavel again.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The partisans weren’t out in the open when they attacked our poorly guarded compound in Frankfurt,” Jerry said. “When they come out of hiding, we’ll know who they are and where their strength lies. And we will sit over them with our planes and our bombs, and we will make sure they stay inside their own borders.”

“Till one of their rockets lands on New York City—or Washington,” Rayburn said.

“Oh, come off it!” Jerry rolled his eyes. “I do believe the distinguished gentleman from Texas has been pawing through too many of those magazines with the bug-eyed monsters on the cover.”

He got a laugh, but it was a more nervous laugh than he would have liked. And Rayburn said, “The gentleman from Indiana had better tell that to London and Antwerp. Anybody who hit London yesterday will be able to hit New York—and Moscow—tomorrow.”

Jerry was saved not by the bell but by the gavel. “The gentleman from Texas is out of order, as I’ve reminded him before,” Joe Martin said. “It’s also my opinion that his argument forgets all about where we are today.”

Martin got a much bigger, much deeper laugh than Jerry Duncan had. When the Speaker of the House cracked a joke, Congressmen who knew what was good for them found it funny. Some Speakers had long memories for slights of any kind. Sam Rayburn had, when he was on the rostrum in front of the House. You crossed him at your professional peril. Joe Martin seemed more easygoing than the dour Texan, but he might yet find he needed to toughen up one of these days.

Now he nodded to Jerry. “You may continue, Mr. Duncan. Hopefully, you may continue without further interruptions from the peanut gallery.” He glanced in Sam Rayburn’s direction. Rayburn looked back, unrepentant.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was almost done,” Jerry said. “I did want to add for the record that I’m proud the person who first publicly pointed out that the President’s German policy has no clothes on is from my district. The whole country owes Mrs. Diana McGraw a vote of thanks.”

“She has a lot to answer for, all right, but that’s not the same thing,” Rayburn said. Speaker Martin gaveled him into silence—about a dozen words too late to suit Jerry.

B
Y NOW,
B
ERNIE
C
OBB HAD SEEN TOO GODDAMN MANY
G
ERMAN
Alpine valleys. The most excitement he’d ever got was when the blast that sealed one mineshaft touched off an underground collapse.

When they stuck him in the back of a truck and hauled him off on what he figured was another wild-goose chase, he just shrugged. Most of the other soldiers under the canvas roof pissed and moaned right from the start. One of them even asked him, “Why aren’t you bitching like the rest of us?”

“What’s the use?” Bernie answered. “We’re going where they tell us to, and we’ll do what they say once we get there.”

“That’s what’s wrong,” the other GI said.

“It’s the fuckin’ Army. This is how it works,” Bernie said, more patiently than he’d expected. “Besides, would you rather be back in Nuremberg or Munich or somewhere like that? Out in the open, at least you’ve got a chance of seeing the fanatics before they start shooting at you.”

“I don’t want to be here at all,” the other soldier said. Several more men nodded. The guy doing the talking went on, “Damn war was supposed to be over almost two and a half years ago. Only reason we’re still fucking around in this miserable country is that Harry Truman’s a goddamn jerk.” His friends nodded some more.

The sentiment had its points. Bernie had said things not very different himself. Hearing it from a punk who plainly hadn’t seen Germany before V-E Day only pissed him off, though. “You better remember, the Jerries don’t know you don’t wanna be here,” he said. “You don’t keep your eyes open, they’ll punch your ticket for you toot sweet. Or else you’ll be the star in one of their movies, and then we’ll find what’s left of you by the side of the road. So keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, huh?”