The Man with the Iron Heart

“How about it?” Lou said. Johannes Klein only shrugged. Wirtz’s grimace told what he thought of that. Lou thought the same thing. “So-you disposed of them, did you?”

Klein shrugged again. “At the Reichsprotektor’s order. They could never have kept up during the escape.” His shoulders went up and down one more time. “Fat lot of good it turned out to do.”

Do you always kill people on your own side? Lou didn’t ask it, however much he wanted to. He was too sure Klein would look at him and say something like Of course I do, if my superior tells me to. He’d already been down that road with too many other Germans. So he stuck to what might be immediately useful: “Where were you going to go after you came out of your tunnel?”

“We were to split up and head for safe houses in the next valley,” Klein said. “The only one I know of is the one I was to go to. And then-” He stopped.

“Then what? Come on-talk,” Lou said. He didn’t believe Klein knew about only one safe house, either. If he was Heydrich’s aide, wouldn’t he have found out about plenty of them?

“Well, you will have heard this by now, I’m sure.” The Oberscharfuhrer seemed to be talking himself into talking, so to speak. After a moment, he went on, “Sooner or later, Jochen Peiper’s people would pick us up and take us to his headquarters.”

“Ah?” Lou’s ears quivered and came to attention. “And where’s that?”

“I have no idea. I never tried to find out. I suppose the Reichsprotektor must have known, but I don’t think anyone else down below”-Klein stamped his foot on the mountainside-“had any idea. What we weren’t told, we couldn’t give away if we got caught.”

“Huh,” Lou said. “We’ll see about that.” The kraut gave a much more elaborate denial here than he had about the safe houses. Maybe that meant he was bullshitting. On the other hand, maybe it meant he was telling the exact truth. Some remorseless squeezing of everybody left alive who’d come up out of the ground would tell the tale. Lou tried another question: “What do you know about Peiper?”

“Only that the Reichsprotektor thought he was an able man,” Klein said.

Lou grunted. He didn’t know as much about Jochen Peiper as he wished he did. Nobody outside the fanatics’ shadowy network did. Peiper had been a promising and rapidly rising young panzer officer in the Waffen-SS till he dropped out of sight late in 1943. Since V-E Day, Heydrich had been the German Freedom Front’s visible face. Could Peiper step out of the shadows and keep the enemy fighting? Lou hoped like hell the answer was no.

The ground under his feet rumbled and jerked. “What was that?” Professor Wirtz yipped.

“Explosives and incendiaries,” Klein said calmly. “The Reichsprotektor started the timer before we left. No one will learn anything from what we could not bring.” Even now, he sounded proud of Heydrich.

“Aw, shit,” Lou said wearily. Germanic thoroughness could drive you nuts. It could also screw you to the wall. Not wanting to think about that, he switched to English and asked, “Where’s the guy who jumped on the Jerries after they came out of their hole in the ground?”

“’At’s me.” The dogface who came up looked like…a dogface. “Name’s Bernie Cobb. Watcha need, sir?”

“Well, Cobb, there’s a Jewish DP down by the mineshaft”-Lou hoped like anything that Birnbaum was still in one piece-“who’s got a pretty fair claim to part of the reward for Heydrich. I’d say you’re odds-on for the rest.”

“Holy fuck.” Cobb started to laugh. “Wasn’t so long ago I told a buddy I’d never catch the asshole on my own. Shows what I know, don’t it?”

“Sure does,” Lou sad. “But you were on the ball, and it paid off.”

“When the shooting started, we wanted to go down and give you guys a hand,” Cobb said. “But one of our officers held us in position. That’s why I was at where I was at. He oughta get a chunk.”

“Maybe he will,” Lou said.

Cobb pointed at him. “And what about you, Captain? Weren’t you the guy in charge of digging these fuckers out? That’s who Jonesy went to get. Sounds like you have a claim on some yourself.”

“Me?” Lou’s voice hadn’t broken like this since he was seventeen. “You gotta be kidding!”

“They’re gonna give it to somebody,” Bernie Cobb said. “If you flushed out dickhead here”-he nodded toward Heydrich’s corpse-“you deserve a chunk.”

Do I want any? Lou wondered. How many Jews, how many Americans, did that son of a bitch murder? Can I take money because of a man like that? But can I turn down a big part of a million bucks? Wouldn’t my wife murder me if I did? Wouldn’t any jury in the world acquit her if she did?

“Fuck it. We’ll sort it out later,” he said. Dawn was starting to lighten the eastern sky. A new day was coming.

Tom Schmidt hadn’t seen President Truman so chipper since-when? He couldn’t remember ever seeing Truman so chipper. The President beamed at the reporters filing into the White House press room.

“We killed the black-hearted son of a bitch,” Truman announced without preamble. “Reinhard Heydrich, who earned the lovely nicknames of Butcher, Hangman, and Man with the Iron Heart, got what he deserved in the Bavarian Alps last night. The head of the lie called the German Freedom Front died trying to escape his underground headquarters as American troops were digging him out. Most of the other people in that hole in the ground-maybe all of them-were also captured or killed.” He grinned out at the assembled reporters. “How about that, boys?”

They all tried to shout questions at once. “Who got him?” seemed to be the one that came most often.

Truman glanced down at his notes. “The man who seems likeliest to have done it is Private Bernard Cobb. He comes from New Mexico, a little town near Albuquerque.”

“Are they sure it’s Heydrich?” Tom asked before anybody else could get in a different question. “How do they know?”

“It’s really him, Tom, no matter how much that disappoints you and the Tribune,” the President jabbed, and his grin got even wider. “An officer who knows what he looks like identified him at the scene. German prisoners confirmed his identity. His blood-group tattoo matches Heydrich’s group-his blood type, we’d say here. And his fingerprints match, too. The Nazis could pull a lot of stunts, but I don’t see how they could manage that.”

Tom didn’t see how they could, either. No matter what Harry Truman thought, he wasn’t sorry Heydrich was dead. Anybody who’d spent any time at all in post-surrender Germany knew Reinhard Heydrich was indeed a black-hearted son of a bitch. Whether he was sorry the Truman administration was taking credit for Heydrich’s long-overdue demise might be a different story.

“How’d we finally catch him?” another reporter asked.

Truman beamed at him. “Because the bastard’s own past came back to bite him, that’s how. The Nazis used slave laborers to dig their hideouts. Then they killed them-dead men tell no tales. But this man lived through Auschwitz. Eventually, Soviet intelligence learned he had important information. The Russians passed him on to us, because Heydrich’s hole was in our zone. We found it, and Heydrich was in it, and now we don’t have to worry about him any more.”

“We worked with the Russians?” the reporters yelled-except for the ones who yelled, “The Russians worked with us?”

“That’s right.” Truman nodded happily. “We sure did. They sure did. When it comes to the damn Nazis, everybody works together against them. Everybody in the whole world, near as I can see, except the Republicans in Congress and some chuckleheads who’ve started a silly movement that means well but can’t see what’s important in the long run-oh, and some reporters who want us to fail in Germany because they think writing snotty stories sells papers.”

To Tom and at least half a dozen other people in the press room, that was waving a red flag in front of a bull. “Well, we got him even though we’re bringing our troops home, right?” another reporter said.

“We didn’t catch him because we’re bringing them home. We caught him in spite of that,” the President snapped. “If we’d learned of this a few months from now, we wouldn’t have had the manpower to do anything about it. Heydrich would still be down there thumbing his nose at us.”

“Now that he’s dead, you expect the German Freedom Front to fold up and die with him, right?” somebody