“How about that?” the doctor muttered-he spoke German, then.
“Yeah-how about that?” Lou agreed. “A break. Maybe. Sure could use one.” The fanatics were good. You couldn’t break into their cells very often. But if this Egon Steinbrecher was happily repairing stuff in Pforring, and if Lou and some GIs dropped in (you never could tell if somebody kept a Schmeisser handy)…“See you later, Doc.”
Lou tore out of the tent. He corralled some of the guys guarding the scene of the firefight. They piled into three jeeps and roared off toward Pforring, about twenty minutes away.
Most of the small town was intact. One block on the outskirts and then two more a little farther on had had the bejesus knocked out of them. Lou’d seen that kind of thing before. Those were the places where the krauts tried to make a stand when the American army came through.
At Lou’s order, the jeep stopped by an old woman carrying a few sticks of firewood. “Where do I find Egon Steinbrecher, the mechanic?” Lou asked her.
“Three blocks that way and one block up.” She pointed. “A brick house with a shed to one side.” If she was lying, she was damn good on the spur of the moment.
The dogface driving the jeep didn’t know German. Lou gave him the directions. The other two jeeps zoomed after his.
There was the house. There was the shed. There was the guy who had to be Steinbrecher, working on something broken with a pair of pliers. Lou pointed a grease gun at his midsection. “Hold it right there!” Lou yelled. “Drop the pliers! Hands high!”
“We’ll see about that,” Lou said in German, and then, in English, to one of his men, “Frisk him, Sandy. And check under his arm for the tattoo.”
“Sure thing, Captain.” The GI patted Steinbrecher down. He found nothing more lethal than a clasp knife. But, when he undid the German’s shirt and looked under his left armpit, he grunted and nodded. “Yeah, he’s got it.” Wearing your blood group on your skin made transfusions quick and easy and safe even if you were badly hurt and couldn’t tell the doctor what group you were. Egon Steinbrecher hadn’t bothered getting his tattoo removed as the war wound down.
“Bring him along, then,” Lou told Sandy. “We’ll question him back in Nuremberg.”
“But I have done nothing wrong!” Steinbrecher bleated again.
“Yeah, tell me another one,” Lou answered. He didn’t remember the last time he’d felt so good. Something had actually worked out for a change.
A Major in dress uniform read from a statement in a Pentagon press room: “Nine of Heydrich’s fanatics were killed and two captured. One of them later died of his wounds. An SS captain was also captured afterwards. American losses in the skirmish were one dead, three wounded. We believe the captured officer will give us valuable information about the fanatics’ organization and resources.” He looked out at the reporters. “Questions, gentlemen?”
Tom Schmidt’s hand shot up. When the major nodded to him, he said, “Why should a story like this impress us? Germany surrendered more than a year ago. Shouldn’t it be quiet over there by now?”
One of the things Tom had learned in Germany was how to read campaign and decoration ribbons. Among others, the major wore one for a Purple Heart with two tiny oak-leaf clusters attached. He also wore an expression that said he wanted to scrape Tom off the bottom of his shoe. “When you grow up, Mr. Schmidt, you learn there’s a difference between what ought to be and what is,” he said in the flat voice of formal hostility. “And you learn you have to deal with what is, not what ought to be.”
Some of the reporters in the briefing room snickered. They weren’t all administration backers, either. Tom’s ears felt incandescent. “Well, let me ask that another way, then, Major,” he said, doing his best not to show his own fury. “How could we have dealt with what was a year ago so we wouldn’t have this mess on our hands today?”
“Sir, I am trying to show you progress in the fight against the fanatics, and you don’t want to look at it,” the briefing officer complained.
Tom sniffed. “We won a skirmish. Hot diggety dog. A year ago, did you expect we’d still be having skirmishes today?”
“My opinion on these issues doesn’t matter,” the major said.
“Okay, fine. Did anybody in the War Department or the State Department or the White House expect we’d still be fighting a shooting war in Germany halfway through 1946?”
“That doesn’t matter now,” the major insisted. “The point now is that we have to win it, and we’re going to win it, and we are winning it. This fight we just had-”
“How many years before we can go back into Frankfurt? How many people from there are refugees?” Tom broke in. “Does that say we’re winning?”
The briefing officer turned brick red. “Maybe it would be better if someone else asked questions for a while, Mr. Schmidt.”
“Better for who?” another reporter inquired.
“For whom?” yet another man corrected. Assemble a bunch of people who made their living with words and somebody was bound to turn copy editor on you.
“For people who want full and accurate information, that’s for whom.” The major answered what had probably been a rhetorical question. “The papers only seem interested in bad news. When anything good happens, you don’t want to talk about it.”
Maybe he didn’t know how big a can of worms he was opening. Or maybe he had orders from people above him to try to put the fear of God into the Washington press corps. If he did, it didn’t work. Even the people who’d laughed when he mocked Tom Schmidt started screaming at him now. Tom was sure of that: as far as he could tell,
“I’ve had enough!” someone shouted-a variation on one of the Republicans’ campaign slogans.
“To err is Truman!” another reporter added, this time parroting the Republican line. Then he said, “And you’re right up there with him, Major.”
“I don’t know how we got such an unpatriotic press,” the briefing officer said. “You people are worth regiments to Heydrich and his maniacs. Here I’m trying to show you we’re making progress, and you don’t want to listen.”
Tom didn’t laugh out loud, but he felt like it. The major had delivered himself-and, with him, maybe the Truman administration-into the reporters’ hands. Accuse them of supporting the other side and they’d tear you into bloody chunks…all in the name of freedom of the press, of course.
They screamed at the major. They demanded to know what he was talking about. “Are you saying we’re card-carrying Nazis?” one of them yelled. “’Cause I’ll make you sorry if you are!” He was short and fat and wore thick glasses: a born 4-F if there ever was one. The major might have been wounded three times, but as long as he wasn’t in a wheelchair he wouldn’t have any trouble with a twerp like that. Which didn’t stop the reporter, and might even have spurred him on.
The briefing officer didn’t try to back down or cover his tracks the way he should have. He scowled back at the gentleman of the fourth Estate and answered, “I don’t know what you guys are. I wonder what the FBI would turn up if it tried to find out.”
That was blowing on a fire. They told him all the reasons the FBI had no right to do anything like that. They told him how they’d sue J. Edgar Hoover if he tried, and for how much. They didn’t ask him any more questions. They swarmed out of the briefing room, swarmed out of the Pentagon, to write their stories and file them with their papers.
They weren’t the kind of stories the Truman administration would have wanted.
ARMY SUPPRESSES TRUTH! was the headline under which Tom’s piece ran. As those things went, that was one of the milder ones. Tom Schmidt smiled when he saw some of the others. If the Army fucked with him, he’d fuck with it right back.
Lou Weissberg lit a cigarette. In Germany, that made him A rich man-he could afford to smoke his money.
