The Man with the Iron Heart

else called before Tom could.

“We hope it will.” All of a sudden, Truman turned cagey. “We don’t know that for a fact. We ought to leave men in Germany in case it doesn’t.”

“Wait a minute!” Tom said. “A minute ago, getting rid of Heydrich was the greatest thing ever. Now it may not mean anything? Don’t you want it both ways?”

“I want to make sure Americans can stay safe and secure. Why do you have trouble seeing that?” Truman said.

“Because lots of Americans keep getting killed in Germany? Because the German Freedom Front hasn’t gone away?” Tom suggested. “How does that make us safe and secure?”

The President let out an exasperated sniff. “Because we aren’t getting ready to fight the Third World War against the Germans, that’s how. Shall we declare victory and then pull out? I couldn’t look the American people in the eye if we pulled a stunt like that.”

“But if the fanatics quiet down now that Heydrich’s dead, doesn’t that mean we don’t need to stay any more?”

“Not if they’re playing possum till we’re gone,” Truman answered. “They aren’t fools, unlike some people I could name.” He stared hard in Tom’s direction.

“Love you, too, sir,” Tom said, and got a chuckle from Truman. HEYDRICH’S GONE-SO WHAT? Tom scribbled in his notebook. If he couldn’t build a column around that, he wasn’t half trying.

“Fuck me in the mouth! They got him!” Vladimir Bokov exulted.

“They did,” Colonel Shteinberg agreed. “I wouldn’t have bet on it when you gave them that Birnbaum, but they did. Now we find out how much difference it ends up making.”

“It’s got to make some,” Bokov said. “We haven’t been the same here since the Nazis poisoned so many officers at the New Year’s Eve celebration. Only stands to reason that losing their top leader will hurt them, too.”

“Well, yes, when you put it like that. They’re bound to be less efficient for a while-maybe less dangerous, too.” Shteinberg paused to light a cigarette before adding, “But that’s not the point.”

“Comrade Colonel?” Bokov said, in lieu of Well, what is the point, dammit? He knew how much rope the Jew gave him, and the answer here was not enough for that.

Moisei Shteinberg inhaled, blew out smoke, inhaled again, and finally said, “After the Heydrichites pulled off the New Year’s Eve massacre, what did we do?”

“We went after them. What else?” Bokov knew he’d never forget the benzedrine buzz-or the grippe it battled. He also knew he’d never forget how flattened he’d been getting over both of them at once.

“There you go, Volodya.” If Shteinberg’s nod said Bokov was slower than he might have been, it also said he’d got where he needed to go. Shteinberg continued, “That’s the point. We didn’t give up. We didn’t figure we’d lost and run away like a litter of scared puppies.”

“The way the Americans are now,” Bokov put in.

“Yes.” But Colonel Shteinberg brushed that aside: “So now we have to see what the Heydrichites do without Heydrich. If they say, ‘We can’t go on without the Reichsprotektor,’ and they forget about their weapons and go back to being farmers and shopkeepers and factory workers, we’ve won. But if they have the spirit to keep fighting under a new commander-in that case, we didn’t do as much as we would have wanted to.”

Reluctantly, Bokov nodded back. “Well, you’re right, Comrade Colonel,” he allowed. Part of his reluctance involved admitting to himself that Shteinberg really was a clever Jew-more clever than he was himself, dammit. And part involved acknowledging that the Fascist bandits really might regroup and keep harassing Soviet authorities- and, incidentally, the Anglo-Americans. “Bozhemoi, but I want them to fold up like a concertina!”

“Oh, so do I, Volodya. If I prayed, that’s what I would pray for.” Colonel Shteinberg blew out a long stream of smoke and ground out the cigarette. “But we’re men now, yes? Not children, I mean. You don’t get what you wish for, and you’d better remember it. You get what you get, and you have to make the best of it, whatever it turns out to be. That’s what a man does. Am I right or am I wrong?”

Bokov couldn’t very well say he was wrong. It might be a cold-blooded-no, a cold-hearted-way to look at the world, but if you looked at it any other way you’d end up dead or in a camp in short order. What Bokov did say was, “Let’s see General Vlasov make the best of this!”

“Oh, he will,” Shteinberg said, but the way he smiled said how little he loved Yuri Vlasov himself. Bokov doubted whether Vlasov’s mother could have loved him. If she had, wouldn’t the son of a bitch have come out better? Colonel Shteinberg said, “He’ll show his superiors that he authorized the transfer of Prisoner Birnbaum to the Americans, and that it turned out well. He doesn’t need any more than that to cover his own worthless ass.”

“Da,” Bokov said resignedly. They’d both known from the beginning that Vlasov would do something like that if handing Birnbaum over gave good results. Bokov’s anger flared anyhow. “He should have done it sooner, the pigheaded son of a bitch!”

“Of course he should. But saying no is always easier. So is doing nothing. If you do nothing, you can’t very well do anything wrong. All you have to say is, you were exercising due caution.” Shteinberg made the words-which Bokov himself had used more often than he suddenly cared to remember-sound faintly, or perhaps not so faintly, obscene.

Bokov lit a cigarette of his own-a good Russian Belomor, not an American brand. He needed it. The White Sea tasted the way a cigarette ought to. You took a drag on one of these, you knew you were smoking something! The name of the brand commemorated the opening of the White Sea canal before the war. Most Soviet citizens knew it had opened, and were proud of that. They knew no more. Bokov did. But not even the NKVD captain knew how many tens of thousands of zeks had given up the ghost digging the canal with picks and shovels in weather that made Leningrad’s look tropical. Well, none of them would trouble the state’s security again.

Which led to another security question: “Comrade Colonel, what do we do when the Americans finish clearing out? The English won’t be far behind them, either.”

“That damned atom bomb,” Moisei Shteinberg said, as he had the last time Bokov asked the same question. It was more urgent, less hypothetical, than it had been then. But that damned atom bomb remained a complete and depressing answer. Till the Soviet Union had its own-which would, of course, be used only in the cause of peace-Marshal Stalin’s hands were tied.

“How long?” Bokov demanded, as if security would let an ordinary NKVD colonel learn such things.

And, naturally, Shteinberg just shrugged. “When we do-that’s all I can tell you. No, wait.” He caught himself. “There’s one thing more. Heydrich was hiding the German physicists he kidnapped in his headquarters. They’re all supposed to be dead or captured. So that will slow the fanatics down even if worse comes to worst.” He shrugged again, this time in a very Jewish way, as if to say, It’s not so good, but maybe it could be worse.

Bokov knew what if worse comes to worst meant, too. It meant a revived Fascist state in western Germany, and damn all the USSR could do about it. That was about as bad as things could get, all right. “Let’s hope they do give up now that Heydrich’s dead and gone,” he said.

“Yes,” Shteinberg said. “Let’s.”

Jochen Peiper hadn’t wanted to go down into a hole in the ground and pull it in after him. That was putting it mildly. The Waffen-SS hadn’t had many better panzer officers. He’d scared the shit out of the Ivans, and well he might have. The last thing he’d looked for was a peremptory order from Reinhard Heydrich. He’d taken his career-maybe his life-in his hands and gone over Heydrich’s head to Heinrich Himmler. All that got him was an even more peremptory order to shut up and do what Heydrich told him to.

So he did. As the Reich crumbled into ruin, he slowly realized he was doing something worthwhile, even if it wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he signed up for the SS. If Germany was going to rebuild itself, if it wasn’t going to get slammed into an American or Russian mold, it had to hold on to its own