The Man with the Iron Heart

“Assholes ain’t gonna run another truck in here and blow up all the guys who came in to help.” That hadn’t occurred to Lou, but some of the Americans seemed properly paranoid. He supposed that was good.

Stretcher bearers carried a groaning wounded man past him and the fellow he was helping. All badly hurt men sounded pretty much the same, no matter where they came from. But Lou happened to look up at just the right moment. He saw a not-so-familiar uniform on the stretcher.

“Holy cow!” he blurted, in lieu of something stronger. “Is that General Nikitchenko?” He was proud of knowing the name of the Soviet judge for the upcoming trial.

To his surprise, the man on the stretcher knew some English. “I is Lieutenant Colonel Volchkov,” he said. “Alternate to Iona Timofeye-vich. The general, he is-” He broke off, gathering strength or looking for a word. After a moment, he found one: “Kaput.” It wasn’t exactly English, but it wasn’t exactly not English, either. Lou had no trouble understanding it, anyhow.

“We’re gonna get you patched up, Colonel. Don’t you worry about anything right this minute-you’ll be fine,” one of the medics said, and then, to his own comrade, “Get moving, Gabe. Soon as he goes into an ambulance, we’ll come back for this poor sorry son of a bitch.” His hands were full; he pointed with his chin at the soldier Lou was splinting.

“Who you callin’ a sorry son of a bitch?” the GI demanded, and Lou’s admiration for morphine leaped forward again. The medics didn’t bother arguing. They lugged Volchkov away, then returned for the man with the broken ankle.

More wounded people staggered from the wreckage. Some were women. Secretaries? Clerks? Translators? Cleaning ladies? Lou had no idea. All he knew was, bombs weren’t chivalrous. That also applied to the American bombs that had leveled most of Nuremberg, but he didn’t worry about those.

Corpsmen and other GIs also carried women out on stretchers, in blankets, or sometimes just in their arms. Wounded women were slightly shriller than wounded men; otherwise, there wasn’t much difference between them. Most of the casualties here, not surprisingly, seemed to be men.

Lou thought for a moment that someone in a dark robe had to be a woman. Then he saw the person was wearing a man’s black dress shoes-one, anyhow, because the other foot had only a sock on it. A judge, he realized dully. American? French? British? That hardly mattered.

The medics didn’t bother with some of the bodies-and pieces of bodies-they found in the smoking wreckage. They piled them off to one side: a makeshift morgue, one growing rapidly. And they cursed the fanatics with a weary hatred that made the close-cropped hair at the nape of Lou’s neck try to stand on end. Turn the guys who wore Red Crosses loose on the Nazis and they might clean them out in twenty minutes flat.

Or, worse luck, they might not.

That enormous explosion hadn’t just brought American soldiers out to see what had happened and do what they could to help. Shabby, scrawny Germans stared at the wreckage of the Palace of Justice and at the rows of corpses off to one side. They didn’t seem especially horrified-but then, they’d seen plenty worse.

“Doesn’t look like they’ll have their trial any time soon,” a middle-aged man remarked to his wife.

She shrugged. “So what? It wouldn’t have been anything but propaganda anyhow,” she said. He nodded. He took out a little can of tobacco-scrounged from butts, no doubt-and started rolling himself a cigarette.

Lou wanted to kick him in the nuts and punch his stringy Frau in the nose. But the goddamn kraut was right. God only knew when the authorities would be able to try Goring and Ribbentrop and the rest of those jackals. And who’d want to sit on the bench now and judge them? Hell, who’d dare?

“Goddamn Heydrich to hell and gone,” Lou muttered. But damn him or not, his fanatics had won this round.

The McGrawshad a fancy radio set. It did everything but show you pictures of what was happening at the other end. And now, with this newfangled television thing, that was coming, too. Back before the war, when people first started talking about it, Diana figured it was all Buck Rogers stuff and would never come true.

Well, these days it didn’t do to laugh too hard at Buck Rogers. Look at rockets. Look at the atom bomb. And television was plainly on the way, even if it wasn’t here yet.

Once upon a time, the telegraph and typewriter and telephone were Buck Rogers stuff, too-except Buck wasn’t around yet to give them a name. Diana’s mouth tightened. She wished the telegraph had never happened. Then she wouldn’t have heard about Pat…. She shook her head. That wasn’t the point. The point was, he never should have got killed in the first place.

She’d timed it perfectly. The tubes needed a little while to warm up. Almost the first thing she heard once they did was “This is William L. Shirer, reporting to you from Nuremberg.”

He’d been reporting from Europe since before the war started. He’d covered it from Berlin during the Nazis’ first fantastic run of triumphs. She and Ed had both read Berlin Diary. Now he was back on the other side of the Atlantic, broadcasting from the undead corpse of the Third Reich. And the photos she’d seen of him-he was a skinny little bald guy who wore a beret and smoked a pipe-didn’t detract (too much) from his authoritative voice and plain common sense.

“As you will have heard by now, Reinhard Heydrich’s brutal diehards bombed the Palace of Justice in this city. The leading captured war criminals from the Nazis regime were to have gone on trial there for war crimes in a few days. Now those trials have been indefinitely postponed. Many people here doubt whether they will ever take place.”

“Ain’t that a…heck of a thing?” Ed said.

Diana shushed him. She wanted to hear William L. Shirer. “The death toll is known to be close to two hundred,” the correspondent went on. “Among the dead are the French, Russian, and American judges and the British alternate. The Russian and British alternates are among the badly wounded, as is Judge Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor.”

“Two hundred dead,” Diana echoed, her voice rising in disbelief. “And for what? To give those thugs the kind of trial they don’t begin to deserve.”

Now Ed raised a hand to quiet her. William L. Shirer continued, “American authorities believe the fanatic who drove the truck loaded with explosives up to the Palace of Justice died in the blast he touched off. Before General Patton’s recent death, he said the idea wasn’t to die for your country but to make the so-and-so’s on the other side die for theirs. Like the Japanese, the German fanatics seem to have taken this idea too much to heart. After these messages, I’ll be back with an American officer who will talk about the problems posed by enemies who don’t care whether they survive.”

A recorded chorus started singing the praises of a particular laundry soap. Diana knew from painful experience that it wasn’t worth the money if you used it with hard water. If you listened to the chorus, it was the greatest stuff in the world. But then, you deserved whatever happened to you if you took radio advertisements seriously.

William L. Shirer returned. “With me is Lieutenant Louis Weissberg of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps,” he said. “Thanks for coming on, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks for having me, Mr. Shirer.” By the way Weissberg talked, he was from New York City or somewhere not far away.

“Tell us a little about why it’s harder to defend against enemies who plan to die after completing their missions.”

“For all the reasons you’d expect.” Lieutenant Weissberg didn’t say You dummy, but you could hear it in his voice. Shirer wasn’t a dummy-nowhere close-but he remembered that some of the people in his audience were. After a beat, Weissberg went on, “They don’t have to worry about escape routes. And they can take chances ordinary soldiers never would, because they don’t expect to get away anyhow. If you have the nerve to press the detonator, it’s all over in a hurry.”

“Isn’t it just?” Shirer agreed ruefully. “We’re standing here in front of what would have been the courtyard for the trial of the century-the trial that would have warned the world no one can get away with wars of aggression any more-and there’s not much left, I’m afraid. Do you have any idea how the fanatic in the truck was able to pull up right in front of the building?”

“Well, Mr. Shirer, if a jeep isn’t the most common military vehicle in Germany these days, a deuce-and-a-half is. We’ve got more of ’em here than a dog has fleas. Put a guy in an American uniform in the driver’s seat-and you can bet that kraut was wearing one-and nobody paid any attention to him till too late,” Weissberg said.