The Man with the Iron Heart

“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.

“Yes, it did. Almost took them too long-although the Anglo-American attack on Sicily and Italy helped us a lot after Kursk, because Hitler took troops away from the east to fight them.” Shteinberg looked annoyed at himself. “But that’s not what I was talking about. They’re soft with one another, too. They don’t have a strong secret police force, and they don’t clean out their troublemakers with purges.”

“They’ll live to regret it,” Bokov said, and then, “No. Some of them won’t live to regret it, and they’ll regret it while they’re dying.”

“I understood you,” Shteinberg said.

Bokov would have been surprised if his superior hadn’t. He had little use for Jews, but nobody could say they weren’t a brainy bunch. That was how they got by. So many of the Old Bolsheviks had been Jews-but, however brainy they were, the purges nailed almost all of them sooner or later.

“Are you sure the Americans won’t let us go in and clean up their mess?” Bokov asked, hoping against hope (and painfully aware the USSR hadn’t cleaned up its own Heydrichite mess).

“Sure? I’m not sure of anything.” Colonel Shteinberg tapped a shoulder board, which showed the two colored stripes and three small stars of his rank. “These don’t turn me into a prophet. I’m just telling you how things look to me. I’ll tell you something else, too: I hope I’m wrong.”

“So do I, sir!” Bokov said. But Shteinberg was a brainy Jew. Maybe not a prophet, but his take on the shape of things to come felt as real to Bokov as if he’d already read it in Red Star or Pravda.

Another Goddamn Alpine valley, Lou Weissberg thought as the jeep chugged to the top of another goddamn Alpine pass. Then the driver amazed him by waving at the vista ahead and saying, “Wow! That’s mighty goddamn pretty, y’know?”

Lou looked at it with new eyes. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just a place he had to get into, get through, and get out of in one piece. It wasn’t a part of work he was doing. It wasn’t one more place much like too many other places he’d visited lately, and too much like too many more he’d probably visit soon.

“You’re right,” he said, and listened to the surprise in his own voice. “That is mighty goddamn pretty.”

A village lay far below. The steep-roofed houses and the church spire looked like toys. A stream ran by the village, silvery as mercury in the sunlight. The fields were a vibrant green. The meadows above them were a different vibrant green. Specks of gray and brown moved slowly across the meadows: not lice and fleas but sheep and cattle and maybe horses.

Above the meadows were fir forests. They too were green, but another green altogether, a green that knew what cold and death were and yet a green that would stay green after fields and meadows went gold and then gray. And above the firs? Black jagged rock streaked with snow and ice and a sky as blue as a bruise on God’s cheek.

“Mighty goddamn pretty,” Lou repeated, sounding even more surprised the second time he said it.

Shmuel Birnbaum stirred beside him. “Vus?” the DP asked, more than a little irritably. He didn’t speak English, so he didn’t know the vista was mighty goddamn pretty. Lou told him. Birnbaum looked down the valley. He looked back at Lou, as if wondering about the size of his brainpan. “Pretty? It’s got Germans in it, right?”

“Well, yeah. But-” This time, Lou listened to himself floundering. “I mean, it didn’t get bombed or anything.”

True, no craters marred the meadows’ complexions. What bomber pilot in his right mind would have wasted high explosives on Fuss-waschendorf, or whatever the village was called?

Birnbaum delivered his own two-word verdict: “Too bad.”

American Jews, seeing what the Nazis had done to their European kinsfolk, were shocked and appalled and grimly determined no such catastrophe should ever befall Jewry again. Eastern European Jews, or the relict of them remaining after Hitler’s blood-drenched tide rolled back, often made their American cousins seem paragons of meekness and mercy. They hadn’t just seen what the Nazis were up to; they’d gone through it. As with so many things, experience made all the difference.

The convoy of jeeps and armored cars drove down into the valley. Lou’s heart thumped harder as the kid behind the machine gun swung the muzzle back and forth through a long arc. Nobody’d fired on them yet. Lou approved of that. He wanted it to continue for, oh, the next six or eight million years.

“This place look familiar?” he asked.

Shmuel Birnbaum shook his head. “Nah. Just another fucking valley. Where I come from, it’s flat. Never imagined there were so many mountains and valleys in the whole world, let alone one corner of one shitty country.”

“Uh-huh,” Lou said. The Alps stretched over way more than a corner of one country. Giving Birnbaum geography lessons struck him as a waste of time. It might turn out to matter, though. If they had to cross into the American zone in Austria, he’d need to try and deal with a whole new military bureaucracy. The prospect did not delight his heart, or even his descending colon.

They stopped in the village for lunch. The locals stared at them as if they’d fallen from the moon. Some of the stares were because they wore American uniforms, which likely weren’t much seen in these parts. Others were aimed more specifically at Lou and Birnbaum. “Aren’t those a couple of…?” one villager said to another, not realizing the strangers could follow his language.

“Don’t be silly,” his friend answered. “We got rid of them.”

Lou’s laugh came straight out of a horror movie. “Don’t believe everything you hear, fool,” he said in German in a voice from beyond the grave. A moment later, he wished he hadn’t thought of it like that. Countless Jews in the grave, or dead and denied even the last scrap of dignity.

But he scared hell out of the krauts. They edged around him and Shmuel Birnbaum as if they were seeing ghosts. He and the DP were heavily armed ghosts, too. Mess with them and you might end up talking from the back side of beyond yourself.

Out of the village. Through the valley. Some of the Germans up on the meadows were bound to be herdsmen. Others were more likely bandits, whether on Heydrich’s team or not. The convoy moved fast enough and had enough weaponry to keep them from causing trouble.

Up the next pass. The jeeps climbed like mountain goats. The armored cars labored but managed. Once past the crest, they got another mighty goddamn pretty view.

Beside Lou, Shmuel Birnbaum gasped and stiffened. “This one,” he choked out.

XXVIII

California again. Diana McGraw had never gone to the West Coast before poor Pat got killed. Now she’d lost track of how many times she’d come out here. It wasn’t surprising. She sometimes lost track of where she was.