The Man with the Iron Heart

We fight for the sake of our own culture, the propaganda sheet went on. If you had invaders ruthlessly occupying your own land, you too would rise up against them. How can a brave folk do anything else?

“Assholes,” Lou said again, louder this time. Tito’s guerrillas, Russian partisans, the French maquis-what did the SS and the Wehrmacht do to real freedom fighters when they caught them? Everybody knew the answer to that one. Lou had seen a photo a German soldier took of a hanged Russian girl maybe eighteen years old. Around her neck the SS had put a warning placard in German and Russian: I SHOT AT GERMAN SOLDIERS.

Once we have once more our own state back in our hands, we solemnly vow that we seek no new foreign conflict. Europe has seen enough of war, the sheet declared, as if Hitler hadn’t had thing one to do with that war and the way the Nazis fought it. All we seek is a fair peace and our own national self-determination, which is the proper right of any free people.

What kind of self-determination did the Reich give Poles and Scandinavians and Dutchmen and Belgians and Frenchmen and Yugoslavs and Greeks and Russians and…? But Germans had a knack for feeling a shoe only when it pinched them.

Lou started to crumple the sheet and toss it aside. Then he caught himself, even though CIC already had plenty of copies. A major with a double chin was giving orders to some GIs. Lou walked over to him and said, “Major, I just found this stuck to the wall here. How come somebody was able to put it up?”

The major snatched the paper out of his hand, gave it one quick, scornful glance, and barked, “Who the hell are you, Lieutenant, and who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’m Lou Weissberg, Counter-Intelligence Corps,” Lou said calmly. “And who are you…sir?”

By the way he said it, he made the title one of reproach, not respect. The major took a deep breath and opened his mouth to scorch him. Then the man had very visible second thoughts. Even a lieutenant in the CIC might have connections that could make you sorry if you crossed him. As a matter of fact, Lou did. Raising when you really held a full house gave you confidence that showed.

“My name’s Hawkins-Tony Hawkins,” the major said in a different tone of voice. He took a longer look at the propaganda sheet. “You found this goddamn thing here-at the jail?”

“Just now, like I said. Right over there.” Lou pointed. “You’ve got this whole shebang around the building, and I wondered how some Jerry snuck this thing in here and put it up without anybody noticing.”

“Goddamn good question,” Major Hawkins said. “Fuck me if I know for sure, but my best guess is-”

His best guess got interrupted. The explosion wasn’t anywhere close by, but it was big. The ground shook under Lou’s feet. One of the soldiers said, “That an earthquake?”

“You California jerks think everything’s a goddamn earthquake,” another GI answered. “That’s a motherfucking bomb going off, is what that is. One huge honker of a bomb, too.”

That echoed Lou’s thoughts much too well. He looked around in all directions. At least even money the jail’s gray bulk would hide whatever had just happened…But no. There it was, off to the northwest: a swelling cloud of black smoke and dust.

Major Hawkins had already proved he had a foul mouth. He outdid himself now. Then he rounded on Lou. “What do you wanna bet that’s the fucking courthouse? You CIC cocksuckers are such hot shit, how come you didn’t keep the fanatics from blasting it to the moon?”

“Oy!” Lou clapped a hand to his forehead. That hadn’t occurred to him. But as soon as he heard it, he would have bet anything he owned that Hawkins was right. The older officer’s words had that oracular feeling of truth to them. A bomb there couldn’t be anything else. Well, it could, but he was only too sure it wasn’t. A moment later, he said, “Oy!” again, and, “Aren’t the judges working in there now?”

If they could have bottled what Major Hawkins said then, they could have heated water in every house in Nuremberg for a year. “In spades,” the portly major added, in case Lou didn’t think he meant it.

Lou had other things on his mind. “C’mon!” he said. “Maybe we can do some good hauling people out of the ruins.”

“You go on, Lieutenant,” Hawkins said, shaking his head. “Me, I aim to sit tight and do what I’m supposed to be doing. For all we know, those mothers are trying to lure us away from here so they can rush this place and spring the big prisoners while we’re all making like a Chinese fire drill.”

“Right,” Lou said tonelessly. And the major was, no two ways about it. That didn’t make Lou like him any better. Sketching a salute, Lou took off.

He trotted on parallel to the Pegnitz, the river that ran through town. The river made a better guide than the streets. With so much of Nuremberg ruined, what was street and what was rubble weren’t always easy to tell apart. As he hurried toward the Palace of Justice, he sadly clucked several times. The fanatics could sound reasonable. That sheet they’d put out would make some people back in the States go, See? They only want to run their own affairs and be left alone. But, no matter how they sounded, they went and did something like this….

Lou loped past a pile of wreckage about a story and a half tall. That gave him his first good look at the Palace of Justice-or rather, what had been the Palace of Justice. He skidded to a stop, gravel and shattered bits of brick scooting out from under his boots. “Holy crap,” he yelped.

Somebody must have screwed up. That was the first thing that occurred to him. The American occupiers had gone out of their way to protect the jail. They hadn’t taken so many precautions at the Palace of Justice. The authorities must have thought no one would attack it till the Nazis honchos went on trial.

Oops.

What the American authorities had thought might have been reasonable. That turned out not to matter when reasonable was also wrong. Somebody-who? — would have to answer questions now that the pooch was screwed. We did everything we reasonably could… In his mind, Lou could already hear the calm, sober voice explaining things. Whoever the voice belonged to, it would be calm and sober. He was sure of that. Would calm sobriety be enough to save the dumb fuckup’s career? It might. You never could tell.

But that would be tomorrow’s worry. Today’s was more urgent. Shattered wreckage of a truck-probably one of the ubiquitous GMC deuce-and-a-halfs-blazed in front of what was left of the Palace of Justice. Three wings had projected out from the main body of the building. One of those wings-the central one, the one in front of which the truck had stopped-was just gone, clean off the map. The other two were shattered, tumbledown, smoking, ready to fall down any second now.

Christ! How much TNT did that fucking truck carry? Lou wondered. The sleepless, analytical part of his mind instantly supplied the answer, and a sneer to go with it. Two and a half tons, dummy. The Palace of Justice sure as hell looked as if a 5,000-pound bomb had gone off right in front of it.

Some of the rubble shook. Lou thought more of it was falling down, but that wasn’t what was going on. A dazed, bleeding American soldier pushed a door off of himself and tried to stand up. He keeled over instead.

Lou hurried over to him and pulled away more bricks and stones and chunks of woodwork. The wounded man’s left ankle bent in a way an ankle had no business bending. Lou fumbled at his belt. Sure as hell, he still carried a wound dressing and a morphine syrette. The guy needed about a dozen bandages, but Lou covered up a nasty cut on the side of his head, anyhow. The morphine was probably also sending a boy to do a man’s job, but it was what he had. He stabbed the wounded soldier and bore down on the plunger.

To his amazement, the GI opened his eyes a few seconds later. “What happened?” he asked, his voice eerily calm. Maybe the morphine was doing more than Lou’d thought it could.

“Truck bomb.” Lou added the obvious: “Great big old truck bomb.”

“Boy, no shit,” the man said. “You musta stuck me, huh?” When Lou nodded, the guy went on, “You think you can splint my ankle while the dope’s working? Best chance I’ll get.”

“I’ll try. I’m not an aid man or anything.”

The wounded soldier waved that aside. Lou got to work. He had no trouble finding boards, and he cut up the other GI’s trouser leg to get strips of cloth to tie the splint into place. Morphine or no morphine, the guy wailed when he straightened that shattered ankle as best he could.

Some aid men were there. More ambulances rolled up, bells clanging, as Lou wrestled with the splint. Some soldiers set up a.50-caliber machine-gun position, too. Lou wondered if they’d gone Asiatic till one of them said,