The Man with the Iron Heart

Not everybody seemed to have caught it. Maybe most people out here weren’t listening so closely. Or maybe they just didn’t want to believe what they’d heard. How could you imagine trying to hold Germany down in 1986? Didn’t you have to be a little bit nuts, or more than a little bit, to think you could get away with something like that for so long?

Of course you did. Diana McGraw had no doubts on that score. Why, Jesus Himself hadn’t lived for forty years. If God wouldn’t have been able to hold things together that long, who did Harry S Truman think he was?

Somebody in a Studebaker driving up Pennsylvania honked and yelled, “Goddamn Commies!” A moment later, somebody driving down Pennsylvania really leaned on his horn and shouted, “You stinking Nazis!”

Diana laughed. “Doesn’t that bother you?” E. A. Stuart asked her.

“Not any more. It used to, but now I don’t care,” she answered truthfully. “If some people think we’re Reds and some people think we’re Nazis, chances are we’re really right where I want us to be-in the middle. We’re the genuine Americans. The ones who screech at us, they’re the lunatic fringe.”

“Huh.” That was one of the more thoughtful grunts Diana had ever heard.

Inside, Secretary Byrnes finally finished his speech. The blind fools who’d sat there listening to all that hot air-so they seemed to Diana, anyhow-gave him a big hand. To get one like that after such a speech, he had to be the best hypnotist since…What was the name of that character in the potboiler novel? They’d made a silent movie about him, too. Diana grinned as she dredged it up. The Phantom of the Opera, that’s who he was.

James Byrnes didn’t want to play the Phantom of the Armory. As Truman had in Washington, he came out to talk to the people protesting his policies. City policemen and khaki-uniformed state troopers with drill-sergeant hats surrounded him, but loosely. Experience had taught them that Diana and her group wouldn’t try anything drastic.

Experience had its virtues. If you relied on it too much, though…

“You murderer!” a woman screamed, and hurled herself at the Secretary of State. “How much American blood’s on your hands?” She had blood-or, more likely, red paint-all over hers. She left James Byrnes with one messy scarlet handprint on his jacket and another on his white shirt and necktie.

Before she could do anything else to him-if she had anything else in mind-the startled police officers woke up and wrestled her to the ground. “You’re under arrest!” an Indianapolis policeman yelled.

“Assault on a federal official!” a state trooper added. “That’s a felony!”

Another trooper rounded on Diana. “Clear your people out of here right now, lady,” he snapped. “They stick around, we’ll run ’em in for conspiring with this gal here. That goes for you, too.”

“We’ll go,” Diana said. “I don’t know who that woman is-I want you to know that. I never saw her before.”

“Yeah, I’d say the same thing if I was in your shoes,” the state trooper retorted. “That doesn’t make it true. And even if it is-well, so what? You go around talking nonsense all the time, of course you’ll draw the loonies. A magnet picks up nails, right?”

“We aren’t talking nonsense,” Diana said indignantly. “Were you there?”

“Better believe it. I was lucky. I just got a little crease in my, uh, backside. My brother Matt lost a leg. We run home now, we’ll only have to do it all over again before too long.”

“I don’t think so,” Diana said. “And the war isn’t over, no matter what kind of papers the Germans signed a year ago. We’re already doing it all over again. Can’t you see that’s wrong?”

“No.” Hostility roughened the trooper’s voice. He glanced down at his wristwatch. “You and your chowderheads have one minute to get lost. After that, we start arresting people. One minute from… now. Fifty-nine…Fifty-eight…”

“Chowderheads!” Diana exploded. But, thanks to that woman who’d gone too far, whoever she was, the trooper had the law on his side. And Diana was bitterly certain the cops would seize the excuse to keep a closer eye on her people whenever they tried to march. She wanted to cry. She wanted to swear. All she could do was retreat.

Bernie Cobb drove one of the middle jeeps in a convoy bound from Erlangen up to Frankfurt. The Americans had taken longer than the Russians to adopt that approach, but it seemed to work…as well as anything did. A jeep traveling alone in Germany was in deadly danger, as General Patton could have testified if he were in a position to testify about anything. A jeep in the middle of a convoy was just in danger.

German POWs cleared brush and shrubs back from the sides of the road. GIs with grease guns guarded them. “We shoulda started doin’ that a long time ago,” drawled Bernie’s passenger, an ordnance sergeant named Toby Benton. “If they can’t hide, they can’t shoot their goddamn rockets at us.”

“Hot damn,” Bernie said. “So they lay back a few hundred yards and cut us into dogmeat with their goddamn Spandaus instead. Is that better?”

“Some,” Sergeant Benton said. He looked very ready to use the jeep’s machine gun, a big, beautiful.50-caliber piece. It outranged and outshot any German MG42. But the son of a bitch behind a Spandau could wait in ambush till he found a target he liked, squeeze off a burst, and then disappear. Clearing roadside bushes back a hundred yards would make things tougher for assholes with a Panzerschreck or Panzerfaust. It wouldn’t come within miles of curing all the Americans’ problems here.

Which reminded Bernie…“How come they want you up in Frankfurt, anyway?”

Benton only shrugged. “Some kind of rumor that the fanatics planted a bomb in our settlement there. I’m supposed to check it out. If anybody can find that kind of shit, I’m the guy.” He spoke like a master plumber: he was the fellow other plumbers called when they couldn’t find a leak or fix one themselves.

“You really that good?” Bernie was impressed in spite of himself.

“I’ve been doin’ it since before the surrender, and I’m still in one piece. So are a bunch of other guys,” Benton answered. “The krauts, they’re pretty sneaky, but I’ve learned to be sneaky the same way.”

“Sounds good to me.” Bernie swerved around a freshly repaired pothole. Maybe the fix was legit, or maybe it concealed a land mine. Sure as hell, the diehards were pretty sneaky. He noticed every jeep in front of him had also dodged the pothole. Either the ones behind him also swerved or else it really was okay, because nothing went boom. Things not going boom was one of the sweetest sounds Bernie had ever heard.

He hadn’t been up to Frankfurt before. Erlangen hadn’t suffered badly during the war. Nuremberg had. Frankfurt was bigger than Nuremberg-say, about the size of Pittsburgh or St. Louis. It looked as if God had stomped on the town and then ground in his heel. And so He had, except He’d used B-17s and B-24s and Lancasters instead of a mile-long boot.

“Boy, oh boy,” Bernie said. “You look at a place like this, you wonder how anybody lived through the bombing.”

“People always do,” Toby Benton said. “I guess maybe that’s how come we made the atom bomb. Drop one of those suckers and that’s all she wrote.”

“I’d drop one on Heydrich in a red-hot minute if it’d stop all the crap we’ve gone through,” Bernie said. The ordnance sergeant nodded. Bernie couldn’t think of a single dogface in Germany who wouldn’t make that deal.

He honked his horn to warn the Jerries in a labor gang to get out of his way. They stepped aside, though none of them moved any faster than he had to. Regulations said German men weren’t supposed to wear Wehrmacht uniform any more, but these guys either hadn’t got the news or, more likely, didn’t have anything else. They were skinny and pale-hell, most of them looked green-and badly shaven.

“Some master race, huh?” Benton said.

“You betcha,” Bernie agreed. Looking down your nose at the Germans was easy-unless one of the bastards carried an antitank rocket or had dynamite and nails under his raggedy tunic or drove a truck full of explosive till he found a bunch of GIs all together and pressed down on the firing button wired to his steering wheel.

Hausfraus queued patiently for cabbages or potatoes or whatever the guy in the shop was doling out. Most of them looked shabbier than their menfolk. They’d got even less in the way of clothes than German soldiers had. The stuff they were wearing was falling to pieces and years out of style and had been dumpy to begin with. A couple of them had on cut-down Feldgrau-probably the only cloth they owned. Their complexions were also fishbelly pale. A few of them had put on rouge and mascara. It made things worse, not better-Bernie thought of so many made-up corpses.

A block or two farther on, a buxom young Fraulein walked hand in hand with a GI.