The Man with the Iron Heart (9 page)

“I’m not thinking that,” Bokov said carefully—even the NKVD had to pick its spots before it risked pissing off a general. “But you should recognize the possibility even so. And I wanted to make sure we could talk without her eavesdropping.”

“Well, we can,” Antipov said. “You’ll want to know about the prisoner, eh?”

Bokov leaned forward like a hunting dog taking a scent. “Yes. I’ll want to know about the prisoner.” His voice was soft and eager.

“Can’t tell you a whole hell of a lot,” Antipov said. “What I mainly know is, his bomb didn’t go off. Maybe it was a dud, or maybe he chickened out at the last second. But my boys noticed him acting weird, so they jumped on him. When they found his vest, they tied him up good and tight and let me know. I called you people. That kind of stuff is your baby.”

“Thanks,” Bokov said. Some Red Army men would have tried putting the screws to an important prisoner themselves. In fact, maybe Antipov had. Casually, Bokov asked, “Get anything out of him?”

“His name, his rank, his pay number—that’s about it. Like I said, we didn’t work him over much. Figured that was your business,” Antipov answered. “Oh. And he says he’s a prisoner of war.”

“Prisoner of war, my dick,” Bokov said. “Not after the Hitlerites surrendered, he’s not. He’s nothing but a fucking bandit. And even before…”

General Antipov nodded. The USSR treated German prisoners only slightly better than the Nazis treated captured Soviet troops. Hundreds of thousands of German POWs went into the gulags. Maybe some would come out one day. On the other hand, maybe none would. Bokov wouldn’t lose any sleep over that.

“I’ll take him back to Berlin, where we can interrogate him properly,” the NKVD man said. They would get answers out of the German. Bokov was sure of that. The NKVD had ways of finding out what it needed to know. They weren’t pretty, but they worked.

“Come on, then.” Antipov got to his feet. For a moment, Bokov thought the general himself would take him to the prisoner, but he didn’t. As soon as they got outside, Antipov bawled for some men. A squad appeared on the double. The soldiers were well turned-out and looked very alert. “Take him to the German,” Antipov told them. “Do whatever he says.”

“Yes, Comrade General!” the men chorused. Their sergeant saluted Bokov. “Come with us, sir.”

They’d disarmed the would-be bomber and stowed him in a shed a couple of hundred meters away. Four soldiers with submachine guns stood guard around it. That German wasn’t going anywhere. At Bokov’s nod, one of the guards unbarred the door.
“Heraus!”
he shouted. It might have been the only word of German he knew—or needed.

Slowly, the Fritz emerged. He had bruises and scrapes on his face and a cut lip. By the way he cradled his right wrist in his left hand, it was sprained, maybe broken. Well, the soldiers wouldn’t have been gentle when they grabbed him.

“Ought to string him up by the nuts,” one soldier said.

“Roast him over a slow fire,” another agreed.

The way the captive watched them made Bokov wonder. “Do you speak Russian?” he asked in German.

“Sir, my name is Fenstermacher, Gustav Eduard Fenstermacher. My rank is
Obergefreiter.
” Gustav Eduard Fenstermacher rattled off a serial number. “I am a prisoner of war. Under the Geneva Convention, I don’t have to say anything else.”

He was about twenty-five—a few years younger than Bokov—with blue eyes and brown hair. The
Wehrmacht
had several ranks between senior private and corporal; he held one of them. He wore ragged
Feldgrau
as if it were new and pressed and kitted out with his rank badges and medals.

Bokov laughed in his face. “Fuck you, fuck your mother, and fuck the Geneva Convention, too.” It would have sounded better in Russian, but German would do. “You’re dead meat. You’re dogshit, nothing else but. Have you got that?”

Fenstermacher stood mute. Bokov murmured to a Red Army man beside him. Grinning, the trooper stepped up and whacked the German on his bad wrist. Fenstermacher wailed. He went white. He started to sag to his knees, but managed to catch himself.

“Have you got that, dogshit?” Bokov asked again.
Obergefreiter
Fenstermacher hesitated. “Don’t screw around with me,” Bokov advised him. “If you were a hero, you would’ve died yesterday. Last chance, arselick—have you got that?”

The German licked his lips.
“Ja,”
he whispered, just before Bokov told the soldier to give him another lick.

“Better,” Bokov said. And it was. Once a girl who’d been holding out let you get a hand between her legs, everything else was easy. Interrogations worked the same way. “So…do you speak Russian?”

Another hesitation—a shorter one this time. “Not much. Mostly bad words,” Fenstermacher said.

Plenty of Russians Bokov knew spoke bits of German the same way. Which didn’t mean this snake was telling the truth. The right lie now could give him his chance later. He’d think so, anyhow. Bokov didn’t intend to let anything like that happen.

The U.S.-built truck waited not far from the house General Antipov had commandeered. The driver stood outside, leaning against a fender and smoking a cigarette. By the look of him, Gorinovich didn’t care whether he stayed there another half hour or another week.

“Tie the German up,” Bokov told Antipov’s men. “Don’t hurt him more than you have to unless he gives you trouble. You, you, and you”—he pointed to three soldiers, one after another—“you’ll come back to Berlin with us and make sure nothing happens to him. Get moving.”

They did. Had he said they were going to London, they would have done the same. After they hogtied Gustav Eduard Fenstermacher, they half-frogmarched, half-lugged him over to the truck. When they were about to throw him in the back, he finally asked the question that must have burned in his mind since Bokov got him out of the shed, or more likely since he let himself be taken alive: “What…will you do to me?”

Images formed in the NKVD officer’s mind. A cell too small to stand up or lie down in. Not nearly enough food. Not nearly enough sleep, which could be even worse. Bright lights. Pain. Fear. Always fear.

Fenstermacher had to be imagining most of those same things. For Vladimir Bokov, they weren’t imaginary. They were the tools of his trade, like a mechanic’s wrench and pliers or a sculptor’s mallet and chisel. But that was all right…to Bokov. Imagination and anticipation were tools of his trade, too. What a prisoner imagined his captors doing to him could break him faster than what they did.

Bokov trotted out a couple of small tools: a pitying sigh and a shake of the head. “You won’t like any of it,” he said. “And by the time it’s over, you’ll tell us everything. You’ll be glad to, and you’ll wish you could tell us more.”

“I won’t.” Even Fenstermacher had to hear how hollow his defiance sounded.

“Oh, you will,” Bokov promised him. “One way or another, you will…. You
could
come clean before it all starts. Believe me, it won’t change anything in the end, except you’ll be a lot happier.” He eyed the German. “Think about it on the way to Berlin. I’ll ask you again then. If you say no—you’ll find out just what we do to you, that’s all.”

“I—” Fenstermacher began.

“Chuck him in the truck,” Bokov told the Red Army men, cutting him off. Let him stew in his own juices all the way back to the ravaged capital of the ravaged
Reich.
After that…The NKVD would get its answers. Captain Bokov didn’t much care how.

D
IANA
M
C
G
RAW WAS JUST STARTING TO DUST THE SPARE BEDROOM
when the doorbell rang. “Damn!” she said, and then looked around guiltily to make sure Ed hadn’t heard. But the rattle and squeak of the old lawnmower out back told her he was still working on the yard. That was a relief. He didn’t like her to swear, not even a little bit.

She hurried downstairs: a slim woman in her late forties, going from blond to gray but not all the way there yet. She muttered wordlessly as she opened the door. Her daughter and son-in-law were half an hour early. That was annoying, even if they would have little Stan with them.

“Oh!” she blurted. It wasn’t Betsy and Buster and the baby out there. It was a kid in a dark green jacket with brass buttons.

“Mrs., uh, McGraw?” The kid had to look down at the pale yellow envelope in his right hand to get the name. He was just about old enough to start shaving. When Diana nodded, he thrust the envelope at her. “Wire for you, ma’am.”

“Uh, thanks,” she said in surprise. She hadn’t got a telegram in months. “Hold on a second. Let me grab my handbag.”

But when she came back with the purse, the Western Union delivery boy was bicycling down the street, pedaling hard. Her mouth fell open as she stared after him. He hadn’t waited for his tip! How far behind on his work was he? Far enough to be scared of getting fired if he didn’t go like a bat out of you-know-where? That was the only thing that made even a little sense to her.

Then she opened the envelope, and everything stopped making sense. The wire was from the War Department. In smudgy, carbon paper–like printing, it said,
The Secretary of War deeply regrets to inform you that your son, Patrick Jonathan McGraw, private, U.S. Army
—Pat’s serial number followed—
was killed outside of Munich, Germany, on 19 September 1945.

There was more, all of it over the typed signature of a lieutenant colonel. But all Diana saw was
Son. Patrick Jonathan McGraw. Killed.
That looked big as the world, and blotted out everything else.

She staggered toward the back of the house as if Joe Louis had landed an uppercut right on the button. After a moment, she reversed course long enough to shut the front door.

It was impossible. The war in Europe was over. It had been for months. Oh, there were stories in the paper about fanatics and diehards. They’d even killed General Patton. But Pat’s letters assured her everything was quiet in his sector. Like a fool—like a mother—she’d believed him.

Son. Patrick Jonathan McGraw. Killed.

“Ed?” she said when she got to the back door. One syllable was all she had in her.

The lawnmower stopped. Ed McGraw’s bald head gleamed under the end-of-summer Indiana sun. “Dang!” he said—he wouldn’t swear in front of her, either. “They here already?” Then he got a good look at her face. The half-rueful, half-annoyed grin on his own faded. “What is it, hon? What’s the matter?”

So she had to find more syllables after all. She managed two: “Pat. He—” But she couldn’t say that. She
couldn’t.
She held out the telegram instead. It had the words.
Son. Patrick Jonathan McGraw. Killed.

Ed McGraw stumped over to her. He’d lost the last two toes on his left foot in France in 1918. In spite of that, he’d tried to reenlist the day after Pearl Harbor. They wouldn’t take him. They probably wouldn’t have if he weren’t maimed—he was well overage. So he went on working at the Delco-Remy plant in Anderson, the way he had since he came home with eight toes, making good money and socking away a nice chunk of it.

Anderson, halfway between Indianapolis and Muncie, was almost as big as the latter. But people all over the country had heard of Muncie. Plenty of people in Indiana had no idea Anderson existed. Neither Diana nor Ed cared about that. They liked Anderson fine. They’d raised two good kids there, and expected a fine crop of grandchildren. It had already started coming in. Now…

Diana had just started to cry when Ed took the wire from her, saying gently, “Your mother?”

Her mother was seventy-seven, frail and starting to be forgetful. If, God forbid, something were to happen to her, it would be sad, but it would be part of the natural order of things. But when a parent had to put a child in the ground…

Ed held the yellow sheet out at arm’s length. He wasn’t wearing his reading glasses, not to mow the lawn. Diana wondered if he’d be able to see what it said. If he couldn’t, she’d have to read it to him or tell him, and she thought she would rather die herself.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said hoarsely. He could read it, all right. When he raised his face to her, it bore the same blind, helpless look she had to be wearing herself. “Pat…” He was stumbling over things, too. “Germany…Those crazy fucking assholes…”

Even now, she stared at him. He didn’t say things like that. Oh, maybe at the factory, but never around the house. Never. Except he just did. And why not? What else were the Germans who’d murdered Pat?

“It’s wrong.” If Diana didn’t say what was wrong, maybe she wouldn’t have to think about that. So much. Quite so much. Maybe. “It’s
wrong.
The war is
over.
They’ve got no business doing
that.
” Close call there.

“Pat…” Ed said again. He was a minute or two behind her. Right now, a minute or two bulked big as a mountain. “What are we going to do without Pat?”

He’d come closer to actually talking about death than Diana had. “We have to make it stop,” she said. “The war’s
over.
How many people are still getting wires like—” She broke off, her mouth falling open. No wonder the Western Union boy pedaled away so fast! She’d heard they didn’t take tips when they brought news like that. It seemed to be true.

“Hello!”

Diana almost jumped out of her skin. There stood Betsy, holding Stan. And there beside them was her husband, Buster Neft. He had a limp worse than Ed’s: he’d come back from the South Pacific a year and a half before with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He’d been an outstanding high-school tackle before the war. He’d talked about playing college ball, but a shellburst made damn sure he wouldn’t. Now he worked at Delco-Remy, too. Close to half of Anderson did.

Betsy went on, “We knocked at the front door, but nobody came. Bus heard you guys talking back here, so we came around and….” She ran down when she noticed her folks weren’t responding the way she’d expected them to.

Her husband saw the telegram still in Ed’s hand. “What happened?” he asked sharply. When Ed didn’t answer, Buster came up and took the wire. He didn’t need to hold it away from himself to read it. “Oh, no!” he said, and threw his free hand in the air in anguish. “God damn those motherfucking sons of bitches to hell!”