The Man with the Iron Heart

the veins there. As soon as he found one, he stuck a hypodermic needle into it and pushed in the plunger. Bokov shook, not only from the influenza but also because he flat-out hated needles. The doctor knew his stuff; he didn’t let the hypodermic slip out of the vein till he’d finished the injection. “What did you shoot me with?” Bokov asked. “I didn’t think there was any medicine for the grippe.”

“There isn’t,” the doctor said. “You’ll still be sick. But with enough benzedrine in you, you’ll be able to work anyhow. We’ll feed you pills from now on, but we want to get you up and moving right away.”

He knew how to get what he wanted. The dose he shot into Bokov was brutally effective. The NKVD man’s heart pounded as if he’d drunk fifty cups of strong coffee all at once. His snot dried up. So did his mouth. So did his eyeballs. His brain felt on fire. He knew he still had the influenza. He also knew he’d have to pay for this artificial vitality, and that he’d be even sorrier later than he was before the injection. But all that would wait. Right this second, he was raring to go.

“Poisoned? How?” he demanded. Far from being fuzzy with sickness, his wits raced at triple time. He beat the doctor to the answer: “Fuck my mother if they didn’t put something in the booze for the New Year’s bash!”

“Right the first time-wood alcohol,” the Jew said. “Lots and lots of wood alcohol. They must have been setting this up for weeks, the fucking cunts. It’s the best thing in the world to use if you’re poisoning liquor. You won’t notice it while you’re drinking. Most people even like the taste. But afterwards…Afterwards, it’ll kill you if you drink enough. And it’ll leave you blind even if you don’t.”

Bokov nodded. He knew what wood alcohol could do. Plenty of illicit liquor got cooked up in the Soviet Union. Some of it was as good as any you could buy in the government stores. Some was better: a labor of love. But some was pure poison. He’d heard people say you could get rid of the bad stuff if you filtered booze through a loaf of black bread. Bokov didn’t know whether that was true-he’d never tried it. He did know they wouldn’t have filtered their drinks at the New Year’s feast. They’d have poured them down as fast as they could.

Over in the next bed, Colonel Shteinberg had also risen like a drug-fueled Lazarus. “You will have held the bartenders and the serving women?” he demanded of the doctor who’d injected him back to life.

The only answer he got was a broad-shouldered shrug. “They told me to run my cock over here and start your motor,” the man answered. “I don’t know what all else they’re doing. If it weren’t for the commotion in the hall, they wouldn’t even’ve told me how come I had to do that.”

Like so many Red Army officers, he’d carried out his orders precisely and to the letter, and hadn’t taken one step beyond them. Stalin had terrified initiative out of the whole country. If being wrong landed you in the gulag, you couldn’t take the chance. That kind of caution had cost casualties, maybe even battles. What would it cost here?

Would anybody at the banquet hall have kept his head enough to think to make the necessary arrests? Bokov had to hope so. (Would the barmen and barmaids have been the ones who poisoned the liquor? No way to know till you started hurting them.)

“Come on,” Shteinberg said, and then, “Where the devil are my valenki?” Bokov had already found his own felt boots under his cot. He was pulling them on. His superior grunted when he came up with his.

“Here.” The Jewish doctor gave Bokov a vial of pills. “Take two of these whenever you start slowing down. They’ll keep you going for three or four days. Eat a lot. Drink a lot. If you were an airplane, you’d be running on your reserve tank.”

“Right.” Bokov could feel that. He wrapped his greatcoat around himself. “Ready, Comrade Colonel?”

“You’d best believe it.” Shteinberg barked hard, mirthless laughter. “See? We get to go to the party after all.”

“Just what I wanted,” Bokov said in a hollow voice. Benzedrine or no benzedrine, the colonel’s chuckle also sounded less lively than it might have.

A jeep waited outside the barracks. Bokov and Shteinberg piled in. the jeep took off toward the south and west. “Potsdam?” Shteinberg asked. “Again?”

“Yes, sir. That palace with the German name,” the driver answered.

“The Schloss Cecilienhof.” Bokov didn’t make it a question. The Red Army noncom behind the wheel nodded. Bokov muttered. That was where Stalin had met with the American President and British Prime Minister. More recently-not even two months ago now-the Red Army had celebrated the anniversary of the Russian Revolution there. And now this.

“We got careless. We got predictable.” Moisei Shteinberg took the words out of his mouth. “We came back to the same place three times in a row, and the fucking Nazis went and made us pay.”

“Somebody should answer for that, sir,” the noncom said. “Even in the trenches, you don’t stick your head up in the same place three times. A sniper’ll put one through your ear if you’re dumb enough to try it.”

Voice dry as the inside of his own mouth, Bokov said, “Whoever planned our party would have gone to it himself. Chances are decent he’s a casualty, too.”

He was shivering by the time the jeep got to the Cecilienhof. It wasn’t just the cold-it was the influenza trying to jump on him again. He choked down two of the pills the doctor had given him. Colonel Shteinberg did the same thing.

They had to pass through several belts of security. That would have been funny if it weren’t so grim. No fanatics could get in and shoot up the place-but nobody’d bothered to vet the booze. Shteinberg said it: they’d got careless. And they’d played right into the bandits’ hands.

An English country house for the Kaiser’s daughter-in-law: that was how the Schloss Cecilienhof got started, just before World War I. Country house, nothing, Bokov thought, the benzedrine making his heart drum again. It’s a goddamn country palace, is what it is.

And, at the moment, it was a country palace in one of the nastier districts of hell. Spotlights spread harsh light on the snow-covered grounds around the main buildings-and on the uniformed bodies stacked there like cordwood. One of the bodies wasn’t uniformed, but wore black tie and boiled shirt. A barman had poured it down on the sly…and got what the officers he was serving got. “He didn’t know the shit was poisoned,” Bokov said, pointing to the corpse in the fancy suit.

“You wouldn’t expect many to,” Shteinberg answered. “Some American said three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. He knew what he was talking about.”

“Sensible, for an American,” Bokov said. He jumped down from the jeep. The noises from inside the Cecilienhof sounded like something from a low-rent district in hell, too. He didn’t want to go in there, and he knew he had to. Then he stopped almost in spite of himself. “Comrade Colonel, tell me-please tell me-that isn’t Marshal Zhukov.”

“It is.” Shteinberg’s voice was hard and flat. “The revenge Stalin will take…Unless…” He quickly shook his head and went inside.

Unless what? Bokov wondered. Unless Stalin decided to get rid of the popular Zhukov and blame it on the Heydrichites? Was that what the other NKVD man meant? Even if it was, Bokov didn’t believe it. If Stalin wanted Zhukov shot, shot Zhukov would be, and never mind that he was the leading soldier in the Red Army. But that Bokov could wonder-and that Shteinberg could, too-spoke volumes about how the system they lived under worked.

Bokov had no time to read those volumes, and no interest in them. He was, after all, part of the system himself. He followed his superior into the Cecilienhof.

It was as bad as he’d expected, maybe worse. The palace stank of sweat and smoke and vomit and shit. Men reeled here and there, some clutching their bellies, others rubbing frantically at their eyes. “Who turned out the lights?” a major shouted furiously. The lights were blazing. His eyes had gone dark. Wood alcohol, sure as the devil, Bokov thought.

“The NKVD men!” a sergeant shouted. “They’ll take over!”

“Thank God!” another noncom exclaimed. Now the monkey’s off our backs, he meant. Nobody could blame the poor underofficers for screwing up if they weren’t in charge.

“No officers here still on the job?” Shteinberg asked, in the tones of a man hoping against hope.

But the two noncoms shook their heads. Bokov wasn’t surprised, either. Why else would a man come to a New Year’s festival, except to drink himself blind? And how many Red Army officers had done just that here tonight?

“Have you got the Germans under guard?” Bokov asked.