The Man with the Iron Heart

was a train, and if it was logic-seemed pretty funny, too.

She wobbled when she got up and headed for her room. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised when Marvin came with her. They walked right past the house dick-he couldn’t have been anything else-on the way back to the elevators. He nodded and touched the brim of his fedora and didn’t stir from the chair where he lounged. His job was to keep out-of-town businessmen from bringing hookers up to their rooms. A respected local civic leader? A dignitary who’d led a rally? He didn’t think twice about letting them by.

Diana didn’t think twice about it, either, not till she found that Marvin had walked into the room with her. That turned out to be a little too late. He was nuzzling her neck and nibbling her ear, and then he was kissing her.

She could have yelled. She could have clouted him. Maybe she would have if she’d been sober. And maybe she would have, if Ed had left her happier the last few times they’d slept together. Don’t I deserve something better than that? she thought. Even though she wasn’t sure whether Marvin was it, she lay down with him to find out.

He surprised her. Well, of course he did-she didn’t know what he was going to do before he did it, the way she had with Ed the past umpteen years. And he did some things Ed would never have dreamt of doing. Diana discovered she enjoyed them, and wondered why the devil Ed hadn’t thought of them.

Then she stopped thinking about Ed. She stopped thinking at all, as she discovered that enjoyed was much too mild a word.

In due course, Marvin grunted and quivered. Then he grinned. “How about that?” he said as he slid away. He sounded indecently pleased with himself, and that was exactly the right word.

“How about that?” Diana echoed. She was delighted at what had just happened-she was too honest with herself to have any doubts on that score. But she was also angry at herself for being so delighted. And which counted for more…she was damned if she could say.

Marvin, fortunately, didn’t hang around afterwards. Why should he? He’d got what he wanted. He quickly dressed, knotted his tie with fussy precision, slipped on his jacket, grinned one more time as he blew her a kiss, and he was gone.

Which left Diana all alone in the fading afterglow. “I didn’t come here for this,” she told the hotel room. It didn’t say anything. It wasn’t that it didn’t believe her. It flat didn’t care. How many times, from how many people, had it heard the same thing before?

She jumped off the bed. The stories it could have told…She didn’t want to hear them. But she’d have to sleep in it tonight unless she curled up on the floor. And just because she hadn’t come there for that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. Now she had to try to figure out what it meant and what she was supposed to do about it.

Vladimir Bokov didn’t love paperwork, but he was good at it. Interrogation reports, intelligence estimates, disposition reports, all the minutiae of totalitarianism in action…How could you know what you’d done to people, or how many of them you’d done it to, unless you kept careful records?

Someone, somewhere, someday, would pay attention to all the paperwork he turned out. It might be Colonel Shteinberg, who had to subsume Bokov’s reports into his own. Or it might be someone back in Moscow, someone who would decide whether Bokov rose or fell because of the documents he produced. He intended to rise. Good paperwork and good connections were the road to higher ground in the Soviet Union.

He was detailing the lies a captured Heydrichite tried to palm off as gospel truth when an explosion almost lifted him out of his chair and dropped him on the floor. His first, automatic, response was annoyance. How was he going to get anything done if people kept blowing things up around him?

Only afterwards did he wonder what the Fascist bandits had blown up this time. If that wasn’t a truck exploding, he’d never heard one. Maybe NKVD and Red Army security had made the hapless driver touch off his all-wheel-drive bomb far from its intended target.

Maybe. It had happened before. But it hadn’t happened very often. Bokov had his doubts.

A telephone rang in an office down the hall. Somebody answered it, listened, and let fly with an impassioned stream of mat. The phone slammed down. Hard enough to break it? If not, it wasn’t from lack of effort. A roar of pure rage followed: “Fuck their mothers-the cunts got the Red Army monument!”

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.”