The Man with the Iron Heart

he was wrong. The answer didn’t faze Shteinberg, who asked, “How about Heydrich’s crowd? You don’t have to run fast to pour wood alcohol into the vodka.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about that, and I ain’t no fuckin’ Werewolf,” Uwe said. “Fuckin’ war’s over. We lost. All I want to do is get on with my life.”

“If you know who poisoned it, you’ll live better,” the Jew told him. “We help people who help us.”

Uwe grunted. “Happens I know a couple of dykes who’re pretty much Reds. They make it through the war without the SS grabbing ’em. Red Army shoots its way into Berlin at last. Dykes come out waving and yelling, ‘Kamerad!’ Know what happens next? They get gangbanged. Believing Goebbels’ bullshit cost me my foot. What do I win for believing yours?”

A trip to the gulag, Bokov thought. You ran your mouth like that, you were asking for it. “Let’s see your papers,” Bokov said. “We may want to ask you more questions later, and we’ll need to know where to find you.”

By his documents, the German was Uwe Kupferstein. Bokov carefully noted his name and address. He didn’t know whether they’d need to question Kupferstein some more or just stuff him onto an eastbound train so he could see how he liked life as a zek. Well, that was a worry for another time.

“How are you doing?” Shteinberg asked as the barman stumped back away. The fellow had had practice with that foot; he hardly limped at all.

“I’ve been better, Comrade Colonel, but I’ll keep going as long as the pills let me,” Bokov answered. “How are you?”

“About the same.” The Jew sighed and clicked his tongue between his teeth. “We won’t find the answers here tonight-this morning, I should say.” The eastern horizon was starting to lighten.

“I don’t suppose we will, either.” Bokov sighed, too. “But we’ve got to try.”

“Oh, yes. And we have to be seen trying, too.” Maybe the influenza and the benzedrine were what made Shteinberg sail close to the edge: sail over it, really. Shaking his head at what had come out of his mouth, he added, “Let’s go interrogate two more.” Feeling in his pocket to make sure he still had the vial the doctor had given him, Bokov followed him back to the smoking room.

When Lou Weissberg passed from the zone to the British, the way the Tommies inspected his papers and examined his jeep told him things were just as rugged here as they were where he’d come from. “Having fun with the diehards, are you?” he said.

To his way of thinking, the corporal checking his documents had his chevrons on upside down. The man was pale, almost pasty, and had an ugly scar on his left cheek. He wore a new-style British helmet, halfway between the old tin hat and the American pot. “Too bloody right we are,” he answered, his accent even further from Lou’s than Toby Benton’s drawl was. “When we catch them, they die hard, all right.”

Officially, the Americans didn’t do things like that. Germans caught in arms after the surrender weren’t legally POWs-they were classed as enemy combatants instead. Still, orders were to give them at least a drumhead hearing before shooting them. Lou happened to know those orders didn’t always get observed. The French thought their mere existence absurd: Frenchmen were practical people. Evidently Englishmen were, too.

“You seem to pass muster, Leftenant.” Yes, the corporal spoke English, but not the kind a Yank from New Jersey would use. He gestured with his Sten gun. “Pass on-and for Christ’s sake keep your bleedin’ eyes open.”

“Always good advice,” Lou agreed. He tapped his driver on the shoulder. “On to Cologne.”

“Yes, sir.” The driver had make jokes about smells and perfume till Lou was sick of them. For a wonder, the guy seemed to realize as much, and cut it out. Maybe the age of miracles wasn’t dead after all.

The British zone lay northwest of the bigger stretch of territory the USA administered. Signs in German lined the road. THE FANATICS HURT YOU! they said, and THE WAR IS OVER, and DON’T LET THE MADMEN GET AWAY WITH IT. Lou didn’t know how much the propaganda helped, but it sure couldn’t hurt. He wished U.S. military authorities were trying more of the same thing.

There’d been more fighting here than in most of the American zone. Wrecked trucks and tanks-U.S., British, and German-still lay by the side of the road and in the fields. They made Lou nervous: too many of them offered perfect hiding places for a diehard with a Panzerschreck or a Schmeisser or even a Molotov cocktail. Hastily dug graves were scattered over the countryside, some still marked by no more than a bayoneted rifle thrust into fresh-dug earth, sometimes with a helmet on it, sometimes without.

Only makeshift bridges led across the Rhine to Cologne. Bombing had destroyed some of the real ones, and the Nazis the rest. In the Rhineland, relatively close to England, Cologne had got the hell bombed out of it all through the war, and then the Germans fought in the ruins. Lou hadn’t thought a city could be in worse shape than Nuremberg, but this one was.

He presented his papers at an enormous tent near the ruins of the train station. “Care for a glass of beer?” asked the British Intelligence major who cleared him.

“I’d love one. Thanks,” Lou answered. “Although after what the Jerries did to Ivan last week…”

“They’ve played with poisoned liquor here, too. Haven’t they in your zone?”

“Yeah, but with hard stuff, not beer. And they’ve done it by nickels and dimes, not all at once like they did with the Russians.”

“By nickels and dimes,” the major murmured. Lou realized people from the other side of the Atlantic sometimes needed to pause and decipher American lingo, too.

The beer was excellent, far better than anything you could get back in the States. The Germans might be murderous, “Heil!”-screaming brutes, but by God they could brew.

Lou was halfway down his stein when the man he was waiting for strode into the tent. The British major-his name was Hudgeons-introduced them in fluent German: “Herr Adenauer, this is Oberleutnant Weissberg, of U.S. Counter-Intelligence. Oberleutnant, this is Konrad Adenauer, former lord mayor of Cologne, former denizen of one of the late regime’s concentration camps, and current founder of the Christian Democratic Union.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Lou said. Most Germans these days claimed to have been anti-Nazi. Adenauer really had been. He was around seventy, with thin, foxy features and a perpetually worried air. Well, he’d earned the right to that.

“A lieutenant,” Adenauer said sadly. “Well, I suppose I am pleased to meet you, too. Not your fault your superiors don’t take this more seriously.” No matter what he claimed, he was affronted. Europeans set more stock on status and rank than Americans did; Lou’d seen that before. Adenauer thought he deserved a colonel or something. Chances were he was right, too.

“Tell me about your new party, Herr Adenauer,” Lou urged.

“Before 1933, I belonged to the Catholic Center. Thanks to the Nazis, though, this party is now kaput. No point trying to make a dead body into Lazarus,” Adenauer said, and Lou nodded. He only wished the Nazis made as quiet a corpse as the Catholic Center Party did. Hudgeons’ batman or whatever the noncom was called fetched Adenauer a mug of beer. After a healthy swig, the German went on, “So we try something new, eh? Germany needs a responsible conservative party. We will not work with those, ah, to the right of us. We know better.”

“Hope so,” Lou said. Back in 1933, plenty of conservatives thought they could work with the Nazis. Hitler’s henchmen chewed them up and swallowed them.

“We do-from experience,” Adenauer said. “If Germany is to become a democracy-a proper democracy-she must sooner or later have her own parties. And they must be independent, and be seen to be independent. Otherwise, our folk will think they are tools of the occupiers, and will not want much to do with them. They will instead work with Heydrich’s maniacs…and with those on the left. We also aim to form a bulwark against Communism.”

Maybe the American occupation authorities had sent Lou to Cologne instead of somebody more senior so they wouldn’t seem too interested in the Christian Democratic Union. That was possible, but Lou didn’t believe it. His superiors didn’t have the subtlety for a move like that. They were paying for the lack, too.

“Heydrich’s goons take Konrad seriously,” Major Hudgeons put in. “A bloke with a bomb under his clothes tried to take him out, but the bloody thing didn’t go off. We nabbed him, and we’ve learned some interesting things about how the fanatics operate in our zone.”

“I lit a candle in the church of St. Pantaleon to thank the Lord for sparing me,” Adenauer said. “I take it as a