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.”
“It would seem so, yes,” Bokov said. “We are also trying to see whether these bombings are connected to Marshal Koniev’s assassination.”
Colonel Furmanov said “My God!” again. Then he cursed the Nazis with a fluency Peter the Great might have envied. And then, after he ran down, he asked, “What can we do about it?” He held up a hand. “Can we do anything about it that leaves more than maybe three motherfucking Germans alive?”
“That is the question.” Bokov impersonated Hamlet. After a moment, he added, “Why do you care? I promise you, nobody in Moscow will.” The Nazis had come much too close to wiping the Soviet Union off the map. Anything to help ensure that that never happened again seemed good to the men who shaped Soviet policy. It seemed good to Vladimir Bokov, too, not that his opinion on such things mattered a fart’s worth.
“Comrade Captain, if we send Germans up the smokestack the way the SS got rid of Jews, I’ll wave bye-bye to them while they burn. You’d best believe I will,” Furmanov said. “You can see by my record that I’m not soft on these fuckers. But if we do something that makes them desperate enough to go after my men without caring whether they live or die themselves…That I care about, because it endangers Soviet troops for no good reason.”
“The Germans aren’t doing what they’re doing because of how we’re treating them.” Now Bokov spoke with authority. “Like I said, they’re pulling the same damned stunts in the American zone, and you know the Americans go easy on them-Americans and Englishmen are halfway toward being Fascists themselves.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Colonel Furmanov agreed. “So why are they doing it, then?”
“I told you why. Some of them don’t think the war is over yet,” Bokov said. “Our job here will have two pieces, I think. One will be to hunt down the bandits and criminals who are to blame for these outrages.”
Russians saw conspiracies as naturally as Americans saw profits. Like Americans chasing the dollar, they often saw conspiracies that weren’t there. Not this time, Bokov was convinced. Furmanov had it straight-somebody who put a lot of explosives in a truck and set it off had to have an organization behind him.
Then Furmanov asked, “What’s the other piece of your puzzle?”
“What you’d expect,” Bokov replied. “Somewhere out there are Germans who know about this conspiracy without being part of it. We have to find out who they are and make them tell us what they know. And we have to make all the Germans left alive more afraid to help the bandits than anything else in the world. If even one of them betrays us, they all have to suffer on account of it.”
Colonel Furmanov nervously clicked his tongue between his teeth. “This is what I was talking about before, Comrade Captain. With policies like this, we risk driving Germans who would stay loyal-well, quiet, anyhow-into the bandits’ arms.”
“They’ll be sorry if they make that mistake.” For all the feeling in Bokov’s voice, he might have been talking about the swine at a pig farm. “But they won’t be sorry long.”
“When the Hitlerites invaded the Soviet Union, they didn’t try to win the goodwill of the workers and peasants. Because they didn’t, the partisan movement against them sprang to life.”
Colonel Furmanov walked a fine line here, and, again, walked it well. He didn’t point out that the Nazis had enjoyed plenty of goodwill when they stormed into places like the Baltic republics and the Ukraine. That was true, but pointing it out could have won him a stretch in the camps. He also didn’t point out that Stalin’s policy here would be the same as Hitler’s there. That would have been even more likely to let him learn what things were like in a cold, cold climate. And he didn’t point out that the Russian partisans got massive amounts of help from unoccupied Soviet territory. Who would help these diehard Nazis?
Nobody. Captain Bokov hoped not, anyway.
Instead of arguing with Furmanov or even pointing out any of those things, Bokov said, “We’ll do all we can to track down the Fascists. The place to start, I think, is with the truck. How did the Germans get their hands on it?”
He hadn’t expected an answer from the infantry officer, but he got one: “So much stuff is going back to the motherland, Comrade Captain, that nobody pays much attention to any one piece. Maybe that truck was ours to begin with, or maybe it was one the Germans captured from us or from the USA. If somebody told one of our sentries he was taking it somewhere on somebody’s orders, the sentry might not have bothered to check. He’d figure,
Bokov wished he did. A German with nerve could probably disappear a truck just the way Furmanov described. “Shit,” Bokov said wearily. “One more thing we have to tighten up. I suppose I should thank you.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Furmanov said, which was never the wrong answer.
“We all do,” Bokov agreed. But, while it wasn’t the wrong answer, it might not be the right one, either.
III
When Tom Schmidt thought of Nuremberg, he thought of
