The Man with the Iron Heart

The two underofficers gave each other apprehensive looks. “Comrade Captain, we have…some of them,” answered the one who’d spoken first. “Some went home before people started getting sick.” He paused unhappily. “Some may have slipped out when the Devil’s grandfather got loose, too. Things were pretty confused there for a while.”

Whenever a Russian hauled the Devil’s kin into a conversation, he knew he was in the middle of a mess. Bokov knew it, too. As far as he could see, things were still plenty confused. Part of him wanted to lie down and forget about everything but the influenza. But neither duty nor benzedrine would let him.

A word from him or Shteinberg could destroy these noncoms. What point, though? They hadn’t done anything wrong. Most of the ones who had screwed up were poisoned, which served them right. If I weren’t sick, I’d be poisoned, too, Bokov thought.

“Comrade Captain, what do we do if the Nazi bandits rise up now?” the other conscript asked. “Who’d give orders to help us fight back?”

“People like you,” Bokov answered. “And if they try it, we’ll whip them right out of their boots. I hope they do-fuck your mother if I don’t. If they come out and fight fair, we’ll smash them like the cockroaches they are. The one way they can hurt us is by sneaking around like this.”

“Unfortunately, they’re too damned good at sneaking.” Colonel Shteinberg’s voice was dry as usual. Only the way his hands shook and the unnatural glitter in his eyes told of the war between disease and drugs inside him. He went on, “Take us to the Germans. Let’s see what we can get out of them.”

Guards with submachine guns stood outside the door to the room where the servers were corralled. Nobody was going anywhere now. Of course, it was much too likely that anyone with guilty knowledge had already got away. As Bokov and Shteinberg went in, one of the guards muttered to another: “Never thought I’d be glad to see the damned Chekists get here.”

“Shut up,” the other fellow hissed. “They’ll hear you.”

If Bokov didn’t have bigger things to worry about…But he did. If Moisei Shteinberg heard the whispers from the Red Army men, he also gave no sign.

Inside the splendid chamber-a plaque said it had been the smoking room-huddled a gaggle of scared-looking Fritzes. Bokov nodded glumly to himself: sure as hell, the women were chosen for looks and figures. The Red Army men in charge were careful about that. About some other things, things that turned out to matter more, they weren’t.

Colonel Shteinberg pointed to one of the women, a statuesque brunette. “You, bitch-come outside with us,” he snarled. He wasn’t really speaking German at all, but Yiddish. She’d be able to follow it, though. And it ought to frighten her even more. Most Germans hadn’t had anything direct to do with killing Jews. But they’d had a notion of what was going on even so. They didn’t like the idea of Jews holding power over them now. They feared revenge- and well they might.

Her lower lip trembled, but she came. As soon as she got out into the hall and the door closed behind her, Bokov slapped her in the face. She stared at him, her mouth an O of injured astonishment. She had eyes green as jade.

She didn’t squawk, which wasn’t what he wanted. “Scream your head off,” he told her. “Give those other pigdogs back there something to worry about.”

When she obeyed, he felt as if he were standing in front of an air-raid siren. “Enough, already!” Shteinberg said, and she shut it off as abruptly as she’d let loose. The Jewish NKVD man went on, “So you’re one of the ones who thought you could wipe out the Red Army, eh?”

“I work in a shoe factory,” the dark-haired woman said. “One of your men pulled me out and said he would shoot my little son if I didn’t come here and give your officers drinks and-” She stopped, then made herself finish: “-and anything else they wanted.”

Bokov didn’t know if she was telling the truth. Her story sounded as if she could be, though. “Tell us what happened here,” he said.

“They gave me these clothes to wear,” she said. The black and white maid’s outfit didn’t cover that much of her. After a sigh, she continued, “I brought drinks. I brought food. I got groped a couple of times, but nothing worse.”

The Red Army officers would still have been more or less sober. And the sour resignation in the woman’s voice said she might have been on the receiving end of worse when the Russians took Berlin. Nobody knew how many rapes there’d been then. A lot, though; no doubt of that.

“Go on,” Bokov told her. “When did people start getting sick?”

“A little before midnight,” she answered. “At first we thought it was because they were drinking like…well, because they were drinking so much.” She had sense enough not to tell a Russian that Russians drank like swine. But Bokov already knew that-knew it from experience. He could have been lying out there stiffening in the snow himself. When he remembered how much he’d looked forward to this feast, and how pissed off he’d been when he came down sick…When he remembered all that, he quickly thought about something else.

“Do you know any of the people-the Germans, I mean-who got out of here before the poison showed itself?” he asked.

“Nein, mein Herr.” Curls bobbed back and forth as the woman shook her head. “I never saw any of them before. Your man must have liked my looks and thought I would make a good whore here.” She looked defiance at him, daring him to deny that was what the Red Army man had in mind. When Bokov just waited, she shrugged and went on, “I think most of the women got picked that way. The men behind the bar might be a different story. They didn’t get chosen for their looks, anyhow.”

She made good sense, even if she was trying to get the NKVD men to leave her alone. Colonel Shteinberg went back into the smoking room, presumably to grab one of the barmen.

Bokov carried on alone with her. “Show me your papers,” he snapped. He wrote down her name: Elfriede Taubenschlag, a hell of a mouthful. Then he said, “So you have a boy, eh? Where’s your husband?”

“He died in an air raid last year,” she answered bleakly. “He was home, getting over a wound, and he was out drinking beer with some other soldiers in the same boat, and the tavern got hit. I think most of what we buried was him. I hope so.”

If she was looking for sympathy, she was looking in the wrong place. Bokov slapped her again, almost hard enough to knock her over. “Hitler shouldn’t have started the war if he didn’t want it to come home,” he snapped.

“If you treat us like this, no wonder we give you poison,” she said.

This time, he did knock her down. She might not have wanted to yelp, but she did anyway. Bokov had to fight the urge to murder her right there. If he hadn’t thought it came from the benzedrine roaring through him, he wouldn’t have bothered fighting. “We’ll kill all of you if we need to, cunt. Nobody’d miss you a bit. It’s what you tried to do to us.”

Elfriede Taubenschlag kept quiet. She could see he would kill her if she argued. He could read her face, now bruised, too. Like so many Germans, she wasn’t sorry Hitler had started the war. She only regretted losing.

Bokov shoved her back toward the smoking room. “Any luck?” Colonel Shteinberg asked him, pausing with a barman whose flat nose and scarred forehead said he’d done some prizefighting.

“Not much,” Bokov answered, eyeing the German to see if he followed Russian. Seeing no signs of that, he went on, “Since the bitches were chosen for their looks, the barmen look like a better bet.”

“So we’ll see what Uwe here knows,” Shteinberg said. Then he fell back into rasping, guttural Yiddish: “And if he doesn’t sing like a damned canary, we’ll see how he likes Siberia.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’,” Uwe said-like most Germans, he had no trouble with the Jews’ dialect.

“No, huh? If we strip off your monkey suit, will we find an SS tattoo under your armpit?” Shteinberg asked. The Red Army often liquidated SS men it captured. As the war wound down toward disaster for them, some of the Nazi supermen had their blood-group marking surgically removed so it wouldn’t betray them. But a fresh scar right there could also be a death sentence.

“Got no tattoos,” Uwe said stolidly. He pulled up one trouser leg to show he did have an artificial foot. “Goddamn French 75 nailed me outside of Dunkirk in 1940. I tended bar ever since I got out of the hospital. Even the Volkssturm wouldn’t take me with a leg and a half.”

Bokov had thought the only prerequisite for the Germans’ last-ditch militia was a detectable pulse, but maybe